160gb Seagate vs 100gb Hitachi 7k100 for speed

Not worth it in my opinion - been there. Now using a 160gb Seagate.

The 7200 is faster, but not enough to warrant the cost and giving up the extra space.

60GB is a lot of space to give up fo ra small speed boost thats mostly being negated due to the platter size of the 160GB. This wasnt an issue back when people had to make easy choices like Picking 100GB 4200 vs 60GB 7200 because the platter size difference was smaller and the RM difference was larger. I personally would prefer the 160GB over the 100GB drive due to the the extra space that always comes in handy.

There is no "one size fits all" answer to this question, so the best answer for you depends on what you're primarily going to use the machine for. If you need the extra space just for storage such as pictures or mp3s than a 5400 drive should be more than adequate as the latest generation are extremely fast and consume less power than the faster drives. But if you're heavy into audio/video editing and primarily plugged-in, or running some kind of database with high IO, than the faster drive will be better.

Having said that, if you do occasionally audio/video edit with a slower drive, but want to minimize the performance hit, one alternative is to turn-off acoustic management in the drive's firmware as this will give a definite performance boost as well as an additional reduction in power consumption (at the expense of more noise coming from the drive).

And for those who need/want the maximum performance from their 7200rpm drives, turning off acoustic management truly makes the drive's performance come alive and provide an added boost in IO intensive apps (again at the expense of greater noise from the drive).

I hope this helps.

Ciao

Thanks for the information. Where can you turn off the acoustic management settings? Also, does it make the drive insanely loud?

The hard drive manufacturer will have on their site the utility for adjusting acoustic management (as well as toggling on/off power management, low level formating, checking for bad sectors, SMART, etc). Different drives from the same manufacturer sometimes use different utilities depending on the drive family, as different drive families use different firmware to control them. So it's important to know not only the drive manufacturer, but also the correct drive model number to get the proper utility. Now as far as noise goes, this depends on the drive, and the level of adjustment the acoustic management utility allows you to control. For example, my 100gig Hitachi Travel Star 7200rpm SATA drive, can get relatively loud if I disable completely the acoustic management, as it makes clicking noises which are just loud enough to hear above the CPU fan, but not as loud as the cooling fans when gaming. Hitachi has an excellent burnable .iso image on their website which allows you to easily boot into the utility to tinker with its adjustments and find what suits you best, including the ability to incrementally change the amount of acoustic management to taste. I hope this helps. Ciao

I have no facts to support my anecdoate. But i had a 100 GB 7200 drive in my dell 9300. I was running out of room and bought a 160 GB 5400 from hitachi and ran acronis true image to do an exact drive copy. So this was not due to a clean install of the OS. the result was a computer that actually felt faster.

Often when recreating a system on a new drive cloned from an existing drive it will appear faster. The reasons are quite simple, chances are your old drive was severely fragmented and that you were running out of space for expanding the paging (virtual memory), registry, and MFT files (so they hadn't enough room to grow). And since defrag utilities need empty space in which to operate even they can't work right on nearly full drives. Even with the best commercially available disk defragmenting utilities (and especially with Windows defrag) many system files don't get defragmented because either they're in use or because certain system files don't get moved because of the potential danger in doing so. However, when cloning a disk to a larger one, folders and system files get copied first and in their entirety. Since the beginning of the disk is actually the outer portion they're copied to faster parts of the drive then they may have been before. This combined with the fact that files get copied whole in contiguous space on the new drive they're no longer fragmented allowing them to be accessed faster. As a matter of fact an old trick we used back in the MSDOS 3x and earlier days (then DOS didn't recognize partitions larger than 30mb and had no native defragger) to revive a sluggish machine, was copying the entire system onto another partition or drive and back again just to consolidate files and restore lost system performance. I hope this helps. Ciao

Where can i buy one of these seagate hard drives, preferrably the 160GB 7200 RPM one.

I don't believe there is a 7200 rpm 160 GB notebook drive. But I got my 5400 at BestBuy cuz I needed it quick. Search on Froogle.

I have just ordered the Seagate 160 gig drive after my Hitachi 100gig 7200 died (2 days ago) - comparing it to my spare 80 gig 5400rpm Hitachi there was a diference in boot-up but I didn't really notice that much difference in performance during normal use. Hence the purchace of the 160gig Seagate.

Good choice.

Is there a real noticeable difference in loading and accessing times between the 160gb 5400 and 100gb 7200?

Not really I use an 80gig 5400 HDD for work and a 160gig 5400 for games, backing up music - I don't notice any real difference when playing FEAR on load times etc - or when loading maps in BF2142. Overall while I think the 100gig 7200rpm HDD I had first was faster when booting (maybe 5 sec) after it died I went for size over speed based on what I had seen on the 80gig 5400 against the 7200 100gig version. I do love the extra capacity and think it was still the right choice.

I'm wondering what caused the death of the 100gb 7200?

Is it true that the newer 5400rpm runs faster than the older generation ones? Say a 60gb 5400 VS a 160gb 5400?

Yes, for the primary reasons being firstly a greater areal density on the platter (ie: more storage in the same amount of physical space, so less 'space' between data), and new perpendicular recording technology used to achieve that.

Stu