Harddrive comparison

Guys, I have a quick question, cause I am buying a harddrive tomorrow.
I have narrowed it down between the 200gb Hitachi 7K200 at 7200rpm or the 160Gb Hitachi 7K320 at 7200rpm.

Both are basically $120 and then after rebate around $95.
Link to 200gb 7K200:
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10005818

Link to 160Gb 7K320:
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10009011

I have a seagate 160gb 5400 drive in my dell e1505, and I need to upgrade to something faster. My current drive has two 80gb platters and gets 34mb/sec on average. I need something much faster for this coming semester, cause I will be working with large cad files and I want to decrease load time and lag.

I am having a hard time making a decision. I do not need the space, since at most I use 45gb of the drive. The 7K320 is supposedly faster, but I do not know for sure, since I am buying the single platter 7K320.
The 7K200 does 53mb/sec, and the 7K320 160gb should do like 64mb/sec. I am not sure on the seek times of others, and pcmark comparisions, so any light on this would be helpful

Can someone please help me make a decision, comparative benchmarks would be very helpful,even if it is 7K200 200gb vs 7K320 at 320gb.
My operating system is only XP, so pcmark 05 would be very helpful.

K-TRON

 

Personally I would go for the 7K320 due to power consumption improvements as well as performance improvements. Since the 200GB 7200 is essentially 2 100GB platters, it would be slower than the 7K320 with transfer speeds. Now I'm not sure of access speeds, the 7K200 might be slightly faster.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this marks Hitachi's 4th gen 7200rpm drive and each generation marked significant improvements over the other even though the difference is slight. That's just my analogy, but it's a tough decision.

In my case I would go with the 320GB 7K320 and get over this debate.

 

Here was my 7K200 benchmark with HD tune.

 

I know it's a different drive, but here is my WD 320GB Scorpio Black. It should be comparable to the 7K320.

 

K-Tron I think 160GB 7K320 will get higher transfer rates, while the 200GB 7K160 has lower acces times. So the 7K320 will be a bit faster at reading/writing medium/large files, while the 7K200 is a bit faster with reading/writing small files. This shows in the benchmarks too. In the other thread (*) we had a couple of PCMark and Vantage results where the 320GB 7K320 was indeed a bit faster. But like you have said before, these differences are really small and wil be hard to notice.

So it's not really a performance decision.

Are you interested in battery life? Then I would go for the 160GB 7K320. Newer technology, like D3X said, and I reckon it will do better in power consumption. Also because it has only one platter. It may even perform better than the 320GB 7K320.

Don't care about battery life? You may as wel get the extra 40GB of the 7K200. Even though you don't need it, one can never have enough disk space.

But thinking about it more, I might also go for the 160GB 7K320 because of the possible improvements. And who knows maybe it does even better than the 320GB version. Here's one site that has a CrystalDisk benchmark on the WD1600BEKT and it's surprisingly good (but I don't know much of Crystal disk as a benchmark): link:

CrystalDiskMark 2.1 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------
Sequential Read : 86.331 MB/s
Sequential Write : 91.702 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 42.521 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 75.573 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.647 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 2.006 MB/s
Test Size : 50 MB
Date : 2008/07/26 8:32:37

So I would say go for the 160GB 7K320. Looking forward to see your benchmark results.

* PC Mark 05 results:
7K320 http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=21532&d=1217085704
7K200 http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=21533&d=1217087228

 

I'd vote for the 7k320. It is newer technology and the data sheet indicates the 160GB will be 2 heads / 1 platter (like your HM160JC) so you should see the 320GB performance. The 250Gb is 4 heads / 2 platter so it wouldn't be such a good choice unless Hitachi have avoided usig the slower inner part of each platter.

John

 

Okay, guys thanks alot. I will be ordering the 7K320 160gb drive later today.
I think it will have a huge leap in performance over the dual 80gb platter 5400 drive I have now.
The seek times seem awfully high on the new 7200rpm drives, but it should be quite fast.

I will run pcmark and post all of the benchies I can for everyone else here.

K-TRON

 

wow, the deal on the 7k320 just got better. Now I can get the 160gb drive for $80 after rebate.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10009011

K-TRON

 

Nice deal! I am looking forward to your benchmarks.

It would be really nice if you could run benchmarks vs. the 7K200 on the exact same system with same OS and same settings. That way we'd have a very good comparison.

 

Yeah the deal was to good to pass, I actually stumbled and bought a second one for my other laptop. I think I will put my raid 0 array to the side for a while and see what one 7k320 (160gb) can do for me.
All I am after is speed, cause I do not ever fill up more than 50gb on either systems.
I may get a third 160gb 7k320 around christmas time, so I can put a raid 0 array back in my voodoo, but I am not sure I need it yet.

I will get those pcmark scores for you phil,

K-TRON