Entries tagged as ‘Hitachi’
Comprehensive evaluation of the top four 7200 rpm notebook drives
Tom’s Hardware compared performance notebook drives from Seagate, Hitachi, Samsung and WD with the depth and precision that only Tom’s can. The value-add here is their understanding of the complex mix of factors that interact in real-life notebook use: performance, power, durability, security.
Note that “performance” class 7200 rpm drives are on their way to becoming “mainstream” class, since more people are replacing desktops and expect desktop performance.
Conclusions from the review:
Although we found ups and downs for each of the four products, all the drives passed the basic requirements for high-performance notebook hard drives, with great benchmark results. However, you should not just go any purchase any of the four drives, as their characteristics mean that some are more suitable for specific applications.
#4 Samsung’s Spinpoint MP2 is a good performer, delivering great throughput of up to 86 MB/s, and dominating the PCMark05 application benchmark, which is pretty relevant. Yet the drive is not a suitable overall recommendation, as its access time and I/O performance are a bit weak, and it’s as power-hungry as first-generation 7,200 RPM drives by Hitachi and Seagate. In terms of efficiency, Samsung is simply not yet where it could be.
#3 The Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 offers balanced performance and delivers good results across all benchmarks, but it does not win a single one of them except the Windows XP startup benchmark of PCMark05. If you want maximum performance or efficiency you might want to look for another drive, but if you find this model installed in your new notebook there is no reason to worry—it’s a good product.
#2 Western Digital’s new Scorpio Black has arrived with a bang. It has the fastest access time and great I/O performance, beating all the other 2.5″ hard drives. Though its throughput cannot quite match the transfer rates of the Seagate drive, WD manages to get excellent results in all of the benchmarks. And despite good but not exciting power consumption results, we found some surprises: WD implemented a sensible power management solution, which has the drive consume the least power at low-power idle and when playing DVD video off the HDD.#1 Seagate Momentus 7200.3. We were looking at the four hard drives from a mobile user’s perspective, so we paid close attention to performance per watt ratings. Not only does Seagate hit new transfer rate records, but it also beats the competition by providing the best combination of low power consumption and high performance. It might not win all the benchmarks, but overall it is on top. Its lead over WD was very small, though.
Seagate sees the importance of 7200 rpm for notebook and Tom’s sees the results in Momentus. Expect to see more of the good stuff in future versions of this winner.
Categories: Laptop PC · Products
Tagged: 7200 rpm, G-Force, Hitachi, Momentus, notebook, review, Samsung, Seagate, Tom's Hardware, WD, zero-G
Seagate Barracuda rated best of nine 250GB drives reviewed
Hardware Secrets put nine 250GB hard drives through their paces. All drives were purchased off the shelf from NewEgg.
Seagate’s Barracuda 7200 came out on top:
The average user will be good with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250310AS, which in our opinion is the drive that provides the best cost/benefit ratio for the average user from all nine 250 GB drives we tested.
250GB 3.5″ drives are bread-and-butter products, good for a wide range of mainstream PC and extrernal storage solutions. Nice to see quality shine through even in this highly competitive arena.
Categories: Desktop · Digital Home · Products
Tagged: Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, WD, Barracuda, Hardware Secrets
Performance delta between vendors highlights different designs
Richard Poelling at The Tech Lounge recently reviewed three 1 terabyte SATA drives. Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 drives came out on top compared to Hitachi’s DeskStar 7K1000 drive.
Additional takeaways:
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The Seagate drives were superior by a significant margin in most of the performance tests, including average Read/Write speed, DiskBench and IOmeter.
- The Hitachi drive is 5 platters (200GB/platter); the Seagate drives are 4 platters (250 GB/platter).
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The reviewer pointed out that reliability is hard to measure, and gave the nod to Seagate based on its 5-year warranty vs. Hitachi’s 3-year warranty.
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Richard recommends the server-class Barracuda ES.2 if the additional price (~$50 based on his data) is not an issue.
1 TB SATA disk drives with blazing speed to boot…this industry has come a long way.
Categories: Products
Tagged: 1 TB, Barracuda, Barracuda ES, DeskStar, disk drive, Hitachi, review, Richard Poelling, Seagate, The Tech Lounge
Tech is huge in Japan, but is mostly fulfilled by multinationals
There are 2 things I’ve learned from my colleagues here about the Japanese consumer and small business market for technology:
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The Japanese are brand-focused as much or more than any country, which means custom-made solutions have a lower share of the market than other countries.
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The early adopters are as geeky as they come! Meaning that the Japanese enthusiasts really know their stuff, and demand incredibly rich detail and knowledge from their suppliers.
For this small but passionate and high-spending segment, Akihabara is still the center of the universe. In this district in Tokyo, end users and businesses can buy any component, gadget or system known to man. A few mega-stores are the main source for most of the volume here, but there are still many mom-and-pop techno shops.
For storage, this is the home turf for 3 of the world’s 6 disk drive makers. So Hitachi, Fujitsu and Toshiba are the usual suspects for storage devices. Still, globalization has reached even the traditionally insular Japanese tech market. Seagate, WD and Samsung drives are readily available as well.
Many innovations here are designed just for the Japanese market. So if you want some fresh new-to-the-world ideas and want to see some really cool technology, find a way to get to Akihabara.
Categories: Digital Home · Industry trends · International
Tagged: Fujitsu, Hitachi, Japan, Samsung, Seagate, storage, technology, Tokyo, Toshiba, trends, WD
Engadget is hearing from undisclosed sources that the three Japanese disk drive vendors are in talks to join forces on drives and other storage products.
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: disk drive, Fujitsu, Hitachi, storage, Toshiba
Enterprise drives now offer performance and capacity
Back in the day, high performance enterprise drives were all about performance, with little capacity to speak of. The performance is still there in spades, as you can see in this review. But maximum capacity has gone through the roof.
This is yet another sign of the sea change in business use of information, exponentially increasing content volume and capacity requirements for even the most rigorous enterprise applications.
By the way, Seagate has launched the next generation of these high capacity, high performance drives. The Cheetah 15K.6 ships with up to 450GB (almost a half terabyte!), and it’s faster yet.
Categories: Datacenter · Products
Tagged: storage, Seagate, SAS, Hitachi, Cheetah, 15K, 300GB, 450GB
Profiting from Hitachi’s disk business may not be as easy as it seems
Will LG enter the disk drive market? They will be in for a rude awakening if their thought process is along the lines of Kevin Kang’s post.
Categories: Company Profiles · Industry trends
Tagged: acquisition, c/net Asia, disk drive, Hitachi, Kevin Kang, LG
