Fastest notebook hard drive? Looking at 250GB or 320GB.

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thebeephaha

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I just purchased a new laptop and don't want to shell out for a SSD but want the best possible 7200RPM laptop drive.

Any recommendations?
 
WD Scorpio Black? That's at least what I would go with personally (Seagate Momentus 7200.3 would be my second choice).
 
WD Scorpio Black 320GB, damned fast. "Black" denotes 7200 rpm; the "Blue" line is 5400 rpm. The Seagate 7200.4 series is faster in terms of raw average read speed, the fastest ones on the market today actually, but that 7200 rpm for the WD Black gives it that edge in day-to-day use.

THG has 2.5" hard drive comparison charts you might want to check out sometime.
 
Joe Average said:
WD Scorpio Black 320GB, damned fast. "Black" denotes 7200 rpm; the "Blue" line is 5400 rpm. The Seagate 7200.4 series is faster in terms of raw average read speed, the fastest ones on the market today actually, but that 7200 rpm for the WD Black gives it that edge in day-to-day use.

THG has 2.5" hard drive comparison charts you might want to check out sometime.
Click to expand...

Dell states it as a 7200 rpm drive and at the bottom of the page is the Manufacturer Part# : WD3200BEKT and after googling that, it comes up as WD Black. :)
 
thebeephaha said:
What is the difference between the ST9500420AS ST9500420ASG?
Click to expand...

The Seagate® Momentus® 7200-RPM family comes with optional G-Force Protection™ technology for hardcore road warriors or even aspiring warriors in need of extra robustness. The G-Force Protection feature provides enhanced data protection against shock that may occur while the drive is operating.
 
I wonder if the G protection hinders performance in any way...

Looks like a nice drive though.
 
G-Protection is just a way of monitoring the accelerometer in the drive (not in the normal non-G listed hardware) so in case of severe changes to the state of the laptop (read: it falls) the hard drive will park the heads in about 1/100th of a second, presumably before "impact" occurs which, if the heads are riding the platters at that moment would cause a head crash and really ruin your day.

Aside from that, it has no bearing on performance at all (there's a pun there if you catch it...) as it's not related to any data transfer activities so it won't affect the performance of the drive at all.

Unless of course you're trying to use it when skydiving, which because of the rapid altitude changes would trip out the G-Protection and keep the head's parked constantly and render the whole damned thing useless... :D
 
To the OP, I put a WD 320 GB Black in my laptop a few weeks back and I love it, quick response time with loads of capacity. The only problem I had was installing the OS, the laptop didn't see a drive. Long story short, I had to disable the SATA interface in the BIOS. Now it's all good :)
 
I recommend the WD Black as well. I just installed one in my Gateway 6861. It made a definite difference from boot to desktop.
 
I haven't put it in as my primary HDD yet, but I did test the new 500GB 7200rpm Seagate drive over eSATA on my M90.

 
My laptops Momentus has built in free-fall-sensor, it doesnt work. I once released my laptop from about 5 feet high on my bed and nothing happened -_-...or maybe something did happen causing it to look as if nothing happened!
 
yee245 said:
I haven't put it in as my primary HDD yet, but I did test the new 500GB 7200rpm Seagate drive over eSATA on my M90...
Click to expand...

Interesting - thanks for that. My Seagate 320gb 7200rpm ST9320421AS benchmark a bit slower on min/max/avg data transfer, about 8-9 MB/s slower. My benchmark is from the laptop internally (intel 45? laptop mobo I think), so it is hard to know if it as an apples-to-apples comparison, but it appears that maybe the denser platters of the 500gb do help.
 
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