Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 Notebook Drive Review

by Drew Niemi

The hard drive that shipped with my laptop was a 160GB 5400 RPM Seagate drive. I've never really had a problem with the performance that I was aware of, it's just that I'm still a victim of my own obsessive desires to tweak the performance of my machines as tight as possible.

Hence, I've always been on the lookout for a 7200 RPM drive for my Dell Inspiron 1520. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for, but I was sure I didn't want to take a hit in my storage capacity. I know some people argue that it's silly to have a large amount of storage in a notebook since it's a more rugged environment and therefore more likely to crash, but I feel comfortable with my methods as I run regular backups on the data that's most important to me. Like, you know, game saves.

This past week, Newegg had just the deal that made my impulse purchase senses tingle. I was able to buy a Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 HTS722020K9SA00 200GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA-150 Notebook Hard Drive for about $136 after rebate and shipping.

Specifications

• Brand: HITACHI
• Series: Travelstar 7K200
• Model: HTS722020K9SA00 (0A50940)
• Interface: SATA-150
• Capacity: 200GB
• Cache: 16MB
• Average Seek Time: 10ms
• Average Latency: 4.2ms
• RPM: 7200 RPM
• Form Factor: 2.5"
• Features Third-generation PMR technology
• Best application performance in PCMark testing Warranty: 5 years
• Price: $129.99 (plus shipping)

Setup

To install this hard drive, I used a version of Acronis True Image Home. I had purchased an external drive enclosure from Newegg, placed the 200GB drive in the enclosure, cloned my existing hard drive to the 200GB drive (keeping the partitions the same with the same ratio), and installed the 200GB Hitachi into my notebook.

Before running each set of benchmarks, I defragmented each disk using JkDefrag.

I played around with different ways to do this, but all in all this should have been done in a few hours - mostly unmonitored.

Test Setup

• Dell Inspiron 1520
• Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 @ 1.80 GHz
• 2.5GB DDR2 @ 667MHz
• Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT 256MB DDR2
• Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit

Performance

I'm actually quite pleased with the performance upgrade. I've noticed some slight boosts here and there, although I haven't timed any game loads or real world applications. Check out the screenshots below and you'll see the differences in performance.

HDTune

160GB Seagate 5400 rpm hard drive:

200GB Hitachi 7200 rpm hard drive:

• 51% increase in Average transfer rate from 32.3MB/sec to 48.9MB/sec
• 41% increase in Minimum transfer rate from 20.8MB/sec to 29.3MB/sec
• 58% increase in Maximum transfer rate from 41.2MB/sec to 65.3MB/sec
• 9% decrease in Access Time from 16.8ms to 15.3ms
• CPU Usage unaffected - duh...
• 28% decrease in Burst Rate from 69.2MB/sec to 53.9MB/sec - I'm unsure why this happened and what affect it will have on performance

In short, I'm very pleased with HDTune's results

Atto

160GB Seagate 5400 rpm hard drive:

200GB Hitachi 7200 rpm drive:

• Files smaller than 8k in size saw a decrease in performance.
• Files larger than 8k saw a noticeable increase in performance from ~35MB / sec to ~52MB / sec

Windows Performance Index

160GB Seagate 5400 rpm hard drive:

200GB Hitachi 7200 rpm hard drive:

• Incredible change in Disk data transfer rate jumping from an index score of 4.7 to an index score of 5.4

As a side note, the HDD temperature measurements for both drives reflects that they operate within what I'd call the same range of about 42-46 degrees C. Also, I'd like to point out that the Hitachi drive is much quieter when accessing data. There is a random movement of the drivehead reader now and again which is quite loud, but I don't see it becoming a problem for me.

Conclusion

To sum it all up, I'm pleased with the upgrade. Not only did I get a noticeable bump in performance, I managed to get an extra 40GB of space, too. The drive doesn't operate any hotter, and since my laptop operates more as a desktop replacement with short burst of portable use, I'm hardly affected by the change in battery life (if any).

Pros

• Speedy: in a fair amount of results, it's 40-50% faster than my previous 5400rpm drive
• Quiet during operation in comparison to my 5400rpm 160GB 2.5" notebook drive, a 10,000rpm raptor 37GB 3.5" drive, and a 7200rpm Seagate 200GB 3.5" drive nearby.

Cons

• Random quiet/moderate drive head noise while drive is idle

 

Nice review.

I'm always a believer in the advantages of 7200RPM drives, hence the name! hehe

72oo

 

i have 2 of the same hdd my laptop supports 2 but my temps are alittle higher than than my previous seagate, 120gb, 5400rpm if i dont have a cooler under it.

right now my temps are
35*c and 28*c with cooler uptime is about 18 hours idle for 8 hours

 

The link on the front page is broken.
This review will clear some things up for a lot of people.

 

I just bought the 100GB version of this drive for about $100 Cdn (man i wish I lived in the US sometimes!).

Would the performance be any different considering that yours has more room?

 

may be alittle but not by much. if you need the extra space then get it other wise i see no need for it

 

Man, I don't know about this hard drive, but after clicking the link from the front page I'm sure going to avoid buying Alienware machines from the UK.

 

Dsnt this HDD have hardware level encryption?

 

I have the 200GB version of this hard drive which I got for my ThinkPad T61 and I'm extremely happy with it. I replaced the 120GB Hitachi 5400rpm hard drive the laptop came with and the performance difference is really quite noticeable.

 

Question, if I use that software to clone my HDD, is there any option that I can change? Like I'm using 120GB right now but if I buy 200GB HDD, I wouldn't want my recovery partition to be the same ratio cause that would be a waste of storage.

 

Good review.

Have you noticed any change in battery life since 7200 rpm HDDs are supposed to be more power hungry?

 

You can resize the partitions no problem. I was in the exact same boat you were in. My ThinkPad T61 came with a 120GB 5400rpm Hitachi hard drive which had a recovery partition on it. The defaults in the cloning software will automatically resize all the partitions to preserve their ratios, but you can change the settings yourself so that you keep the size of the recovery partition the same.

A little bit. If I had to take a guess, I might have lost somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes of battery life.

 

My nw8440 came with the 100Gb version of this drive (the 7K100 I think), and I'm pleased with it. Granted, I haven't tried throwing in a slower HD to see how much of a performance decrease I get, but based on this review, it seems like it would be noticeable.

I'm surprised that you mentioned that the 7K200 was quiet, because the only 'issue' I have with this drive is that it is a bit noisy during read/write operations. But then again, I tend to prefer noisy hard drives over quiet ones anyway. They give me feedback as to what the computer is doing

 

I have the 160GB version coming with R61. It runs much faster than my previous Seagate 5400.3. Definitely a good choice.

 

Anyone know which 5400 RPM HDD the new Macbooks are using?

 

I have upgraded my laptop with this harddisk, I must say it is worth the upgrade . Only complain is that this harddisk gives off a click click sound when in use.
Something like the click of death when a harddisk is failing or have failed. But it is softer. But scary when you hear it.

More about the upgrade at my blog site
http://sz55gn.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/notebook-harddisk-upgrade/

 

Interesting that you put this hard drive into a Sony VAIO SZ, which is a thin-and-light notebook and is supposed to be carried around. Do you experience any significant drop in battery life?

 

Regarding the click noise, you can try to change that. The hard drive has an option called "Automatic acoustic management". Different software utilities can access it. For example you can find the relevant section here:
http://www.pbus-167.com/nhc/nhc_faq.htm#anchor_harddisk

 

Thanks for the review... I wonder how two of these puppies in RAID 0 would perform. That price is pretty hot.

How fast is windows start-up?

 

i've had this drive in my thinkpad t61 for a couple months now and I'm very satisfied.
I agree that at idle it has those random head noises but it's nothing bothersome. I leave my laptop on next to my bed (2 feet away) and haven't had any sleep issues

 

I use my laptop mostly as a desktop replacement so I haven't had the opportunity to notice. THG used it in one of their benchmarks, though...

Link

 

Battery life would not be heavily affected by Harddisk, The average harddisk consumption of 7200 RPM harddisk is about 3W active with 1W idle while that of 5400RPM is 2-2.5W active and 0.5W idle. Compared to 35W TPD of Txxxx class processor. The power consumption of the display is also of significant.