Warning off the Hitachi 7K320 in the MBP Santa Rosa - it gets too hot!

The Hitachi 7K320 is supposed to operate in the same power use / heat dissipation envelope as 5400 drives. I crave speed, so I got one as soon as I could get a hold of it. I purchased it from OWC with a FW800 external enclosure.

When the package came, I was a little surprised to see a giant heat sink on the QWZ enclosure. But I figured they probably wanted to err on the side of caution, and swapped it into my MBP.

Well. It works fine under normal use. It's fast, as you'd imagine. But it has a fatal flaw: It tends to shut down when the computer gets too hot, which is when the CPU is at max. for an extended period of time. Probably also during heavy 3D use but I never do that so I can't say for sure.

I am running smcFanControl to up the fan speeds and keep things cool, but it doesn't really help.

Symptoms: When I have CPU usage of 100% for a period of time, the system will stop responding completely. I can still move the mouse, and some apps still work - probably those that don't do anything to the hard drive. But a lot of other apps are completely frozen. The HD makes a weird clicking noise at the same time.

For recovery, I usually shut down the system and let it cool off a bit. One time, I put it outside when it was really cold, and it recovered too.

Once things are up and running again, I always do a disk check, but never find any errors. So I think it's more that the HD has some kind of sensor and takes a break when it gets too hot. At least thats what I am hoping. But I can't really leave the system running unsupervised, so I'll go back to my 320/5400 drive soon.

 

You may want to consider undervolting with Coolbook. It can significantly lower temperatures.

You could also try to see if HD Tune Pro can change the temperature of your drive by setting the AAM value.

As an alternative you could go for WD5000BEVT. It's a fast as 320GB/7200rpm but 5400rpm.

 

Thanks for the tips - what's the AAM value? HD Tune Pro is Windows only and doesn't run in VMWare Fusion. I'd need to install BootCamp and WinXP, so that would be a pretty major effort.

 

how is it as fast as a 7200rpm drive but only runs at 5400rpm?

 

Disk platters and density

 

Ok yeah that would be quite an effort. Try Coolbook first. That's a OS X app.

The AAM setting is something that lets you choose between speed and noise reduction. The lower noise setting may also influence heat. The value can be set anywhere between 255 and 0.

Like xprohx said, higher data density. 250GB per platter.

Benchmark results:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=305890&page=3

 

That sounds terrible! You should NOT have to do any undervolting. I have had a 200GB Hitachi 7200rpm drive in my MBP until I replaced it with the Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200rpm, and neither give me any trouble at full load on my MBP. I'd send the drive back. Temperatures should not get close to maxing out the HD's ability to deal with it. And that WD5000BEVT isn't necessarily as fast as a 7200rpm drive. Just an FYI. You need to look at I/O values, to see how it deals with *general* stuff. For example, the Seagate 320GB 7200rpm 2.5" drive is very fast at reads and writes, but terrible at I/O, which makes it slower for loading applications, loading games, loading the OS, loading multiple things at once. So you really do need to look at the whole story there!

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...tml?prod[2040]=on&prod[2037]=on&prod[2039]=on

Well I wouldn't say the 7200.3 is terrible at I/O. It's just that the Scorpio Black is excellent at it. The 7200.3 seems comparable to the 7k320 at I/O, losing in Database I/O and Fileserver I/O but winning in Workstation I/O and Webserver I/O so they are kind of tied. But, as you mentioned the 7200.3 has the best read and write transfer rates over the Scorpio Black and 7k320 and has the lowest power consumption. The 7200.3 actually narrowly beats the Scorpio Black in I/O per Watt ( http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hard-drive,2006-14.html).

I'm not sure if there is a direct correlation between power consumption and heat, but it certainly couldn't hurt. I have the 320GB 7200.3 in my MBP and don't have any problems with either heat or vibration. Battery life doesn't seem much different than when I had my 5k160, but performance is much improved.

 

Not just terrible - it's ludicrous! Why would anyone install a 7200rpm performance-oriented drive just to have to then undervolt the processor? HELLO!? Either the drive is broken or, due to the heat it puts out, it just doesn't belong in the MBP. Do NOT undervolt your computer - you might as well go out and get yourself a nice 4200rpm drive, at that point.

 

If the MBP suffers from heating problems undervolting is an efficient solution.

Undervolting does not limit performance in any way. Performance stays the same, while heat goes down, and battery life extends.

Just curious where you base this on.

If it's Tom's Hardware I would not trust their numbers. A couple of guys ran some benchmarks which showed Tom's Hardware either got a bogus 7200.3 or they made some mistakes.

 

How is your 7k320 running hot?
I have the single platter 7K320 160Gb drive and the peak temperature right is about 122F, normal idel temp is 107-109F, and listening to music temps are between 109 and 113F.
The drive barely gets hot at all and it is whisper quiet in both my Dell E1505 and my Clevo D900K.
I am not familiar with the Mac Operating system, but in windows their is a registry where we can configure what we can enable/disable.
If their is something like that in the MAC OSX, you may want to spend some time doing that.
Shutting off background processes will decrease disc temperatures and keep the drive quieter, since less programs will be needing to access the drive.

K-TRON

 

Try here:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079/10

And the next page after...

 

OK, I retract the "terrible" comment. It IS, however, pretty darn bad. Slower than a 5400rpm drive if you'll believe the Techreport article cited in the post above.

 

Yes I've seen this review.

There have been a couple of members running PC Mark and Vantage benchmarks on their Seagate 7200.3 showing the 7200.3 to be faster than the Hitachi and WD. By quite a margin. Now PC Mark and Vantage do take I/O into account. The PCMark results of the 7200.3 were much higher than the Tom's Hardware results.

Techreport also shows low real life performance of the 7200.3 (not just the I/O benchmarks). Even lower than the 320GB/5400rpm WD. My explanation for this is that Techreport used an early version of the 7200.3. It would make sense because their review is dated 21 july. I'm not sure about this but it's the only way I can make sense of it.

 

You don't understand what Undervolting is. You seem to be referring to underclocking, which causes a performance loss. Undervolting causes no such performance loss.

 

looks like a new mbp user, 1 st month jitters.