Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Consumer Hardware & Components > The ultimate notebook HD just arrived

The ultimate notebook HD just arrived
Thread Tools
Simon
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 6, 2009, 11:08 AM
 
The Seagate Momentus 7200.4 has started selling. It's the first 7200rpm 500GB notebook drive. At 9.5mm thickness it will fit any MB or MBP.

BareFeats tested it and noted it was super-quiet and under load never got hotter than 91F/33C.




Newegg is selling it for $140 (price includes shipping).
     
ghporter
Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 6, 2009, 10:59 PM
 
DANG!!! Half a terabyte for $140 is one very good thing, but the ENORMOUS advance in read and write speed is breathtaking. Holy freaking chrome!

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
Cold Warrior
Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Polwaristan
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 7, 2009, 01:29 PM
 
I just upgraded over Christmas to 320 GB 7200 but this is a good price for what looks like a fast drive. I may just have to upgrade again.
     
seanc
Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Cambridge, UK
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 7, 2009, 01:31 PM
 
I just bought a 500GB 5400rpm WD drive.
I thought about that Seagate drive or one very similar but went for the cheaper option.
     
Atheist
Mac Elite
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Back in the Good Ole US of A
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 7, 2009, 02:26 PM
 
Nice drive... wish I had $140 laying around waiting to be spent.
     
Simon  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 7, 2009, 02:54 PM
 
Originally Posted by Cold Warrior View Post
I just upgraded over Christmas to 320 GB 7200 but this is a good price for what looks like a fast drive. I may just have to upgrade again.
Similar situation here. I just recently bought a Momentus 7200.3 (320GB, 7200rpm). It is an excellent and inexpensive drive, but this offer is just soo tempting. The performance is awesome compared to any previously existing drive. Might just have to get one...
     
mduell
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 7, 2009, 05:35 PM
 
What's Disktester? Is that like the Xbench of hard drive utilities? It appears to be written by someone called diglloyd.

Where's the industry standard benchmarks, like IOmeter?
     
Simon  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 7, 2009, 06:25 PM
 
So you've never heard of Lloyd Chambers? Are you new to the Mac or what?




     
ghporter
Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 7, 2009, 07:38 PM
 
Assuming my purchase of a new clothes dryer today doesn't hose up my finances too much, I'm looking at one of these drives and installation in my '06 MBP this spring (date to be determined). Unless something even more awesome comes out in the mean time.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
seanc
Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Cambridge, UK
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 7, 2009, 07:41 PM
 
How many of those hard drives could you buy for the price of that clothes dryer?
Installation is relatively easy assuming the layout is similar to my MBP - the most frustrating part is a ribbon cable very well stuck to the top of the hard drive that needs a combination of gentle force to be removed.
     
Spheric Harlot
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: 888500128, C3, 2nd soft.
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 7, 2009, 08:47 PM
 
That looks very, very good.

Let's see what Tom's Hardware has to say in their next shootout...
     
RMXO
Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 7, 2009, 09:27 PM
 
dang it. I was impatient about bought the Samsung Spinpoint 500GB 5400RPM 3 wks ago for $99. Oh well, im happy with my purchase but I'm very tempted to get this drive though and use my old drive as a backup drive.
MacBook Pro 15" Unibody | iPhone 16GB 3G
     
Tomchu
Mac Elite
Join Date: Sep 2005
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 12:22 AM
 
I don't get those results.

I myself have a WD Scorpio Black 320 GB in my MBP, and I can regularly hit 80-85 MB/s sustained read. This guy's graphs only show it doing 66 MB/s.
     
Spheric Harlot
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: 888500128, C3, 2nd soft.
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 04:49 AM
 
No mention of test conditions - HD content (performance varies *greatly* depending on how full the drive is, with different drives performing *very* differently), machine (are those tests really done in the identical machine? Doubtful: it looks like they pulled the previous values up from earlier tests.).

The thing looks to be a screamer, but if you really want to know how this drive stacks up, these are the guys to watch: http://www.tomshardware.com/

(I am not affiliated with Tom's Hardware in any way, shape, or form. I have merely found their hard drive shootouts to be meticulous and extremely comprehensive.)
     
dowNNshift
Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Nov 2001
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 12:49 PM
 
That's pretty spiffy, thanks for the link...

I hope Seagate's Quality Control has improved though. I've stopped stocking and using them for the greater part of a year since I had a month long bad batch.

Competition is good though, this should push Hitachi and WD to come out with a competitive product.
     
mduell
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 01:52 PM
 
Originally Posted by Simon View Post
So you've never heard of Lloyd Chambers? Are you new to the Mac or what?
No and yes.

None of the quickbench figures cover IO performance.
     
Simon  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 04:23 PM
 
Originally Posted by dowNNshift View Post
Competition is good though, this should push Hitachi and WD to come out with a competitive product.
Indeed. The main advantage with this new type of drive are the 250 GB per platter. That means even if you compare it to the fastest available 320 GB drive (the Momentus 7200.3 has 160 GB per platter) this drive will be a good deal faster simply thanks to its density. And that's exactly what we see in the Barefeats plots.
     
Ted L. Nancy
Mac Enthusiast
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Thousand Oaks, CA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 07:17 PM
 
I tell ya... Just when I am resolved to save some money and to stop buying new computer equipment every month, somebody on these forums goes and posts something like this!
10.7.1 on Mac Pro 8x2.8
     
CharlesS
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 08:15 PM
 
^ The trick to avoiding spending lots of money on computer equipment is always to keep in mind what the next thing on the horizon is. In this case, my strategy is to give SSDs a while to become affordable, and then I'll be able to get something that will absolutely smoke any conventional notebook drive, even this one. Of course, once affordable SSDs come out, there'll be something even better just around the corner, so I'll want to wait for that... it's a great money-saving technique.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
DCJ001
Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Oct 2007
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 08:29 PM
 
Originally Posted by CharlesS View Post
^ The trick to avoiding spending lots of money on computer equipment is always to keep in mind what the next thing on the horizon is. In this case, my strategy is to give SSDs a while to become affordable, and then I'll be able to get something that will absolutely smoke any conventional notebook drive, even this one. Of course, once affordable SSDs come out, there'll be something even better just around the corner, so I'll want to wait for that... it's a great money-saving technique.
Exactly.

How does this sound:

"512GB... peak read speeds of 240MB per second and write speeds of 200MB per second..."

Coming soon:

http://www.electronista.com/articles...iba.512gb.ssd/
     
mduell
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 08:42 PM
 
The really exciting part about SSDs isn't the bulk transfer rates, it's the IO performance.

Lloyd Chambers appears to be a photographer; not sure what his hard drive benchmarking credentials are.
     
CharlesS
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 08:54 PM
 
Yes, I think I've read that there are some SSDs out there that are actually fast enough for the speed of the SATA bus to be a bottleneck.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
besson3c
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: yes
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 8, 2009, 11:55 PM
 
Are there any hardware prereqs to make full use of 7200 RPMs?
     
Simon  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 9, 2009, 04:00 AM
 
More benchmarks



( Last edited by Simon; Feb 9, 2009 at 04:09 AM. )
     
olePigeon
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Dec 1999
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 9, 2009, 06:03 PM
 
Does anyone have performance benchmarks on SAS SSD drives? SSD drives don't appear to be all that faster, but I would imagine it may be a result of the limitations of the SATA interface. SAS has superior sustained throughput compared to SATA, so I'm wondering what the speeds would be like.

Or for that matter, FC SSDs.
"…I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F. Roberts
     
CharlesS
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 9, 2009, 06:30 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
SSD drives don't appear to be all that faster
The SSD drives that mere mortals can afford right now, the cheap ones from OCZ and the like - don't appear to be all that faster, but that's not true of SSDs in general. Check out these benchmarks:

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/168...ate/index.html

Of course, the drive being reviewed here is a high-end model that costs thousands of dollars - but that will change. As the technology improves, and as SSDs get more popular and start to take advantage of economies of scale, high-performance SSDs will become the norm. Give it a couple of years or so, and we'll all be using blazing fast SSDs in our laptops that will make today's hard drives look like floppy disks.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
mduell
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 9, 2009, 09:44 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
Does anyone have performance benchmarks on SAS SSD drives? SSD drives don't appear to be all that faster, but I would imagine it may be a result of the limitations of the SATA interface. SAS has superior sustained throughput compared to SATA, so I'm wondering what the speeds would be like.

Or for that matter, FC SSDs.
This test includes spinny disks, flash SSDs, and DRAM-based products.
     
Simon  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 10, 2009, 03:48 AM
 
Originally Posted by CharlesS View Post
The SSD drives that mere mortals can afford right now, the cheap ones from OCZ and the like - don't appear to be all that faster, but that's not true of SSDs in general.
Unfortunately that's the case right now. Here's this new 7200.4 Momentus against a 64GB SSD from Samsung (at almost $500 not that cheap!). They were both benchmarked in the same notebook.

Momentus 7200.4


Samsung 64GB SSD


Good i/o performance is nice, but it's of no use to me if bulk transfers aren't up to par.

Hopefully truly fast SSDs will become more affordable soon. It would be nice if affordable SSD didn't almost automatically mean crappy SSD. I hope when I buy the rev B unibody MBP (as soon as they come out) I'll be buying my last notebook HDD. I'm not so sure though...
( Last edited by Simon; Feb 10, 2009 at 04:03 AM. )
     
CharlesS
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 10, 2009, 05:12 AM
 
Originally Posted by Simon View Post
Unfortunately that's the case right now. Here's this new 7200.4 Momentus against a 64GB SSD from Samsung (at almost $500 not that cheap!).
$500 is cheap for a SSD at the present time (the high-end costing thousands of dollars), although this is likely to change in the next couple of years.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
Simon  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 10, 2009, 05:31 AM
 
Originally Posted by CharlesS View Post
$500 is cheap for a SSD at the present time (the high-end costing thousands of dollars), although this is likely to change in the next couple of years.
I know. It's cheap for a 64GB SSD. But the problem is that this $500 SSD is being put to shame by a $140 HDD that also offers 7 times the capacity. Even if this SSD has better i/o performance, for most people that won't be able to make up for its disadvantages. Not to mention that most consumers will not put a $500 drive in their $1000 notebook.

SSDs will definitely get there. But it's taking a while. And the current state of the economy is likely to slow that down further.
     
DCJ001
Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Oct 2007
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 10, 2009, 11:23 PM
 
64GB SSD for $131:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc..._-NA-_-NA-_-NA

Like all other technology, it's going to get bigger, better, faster, and less expensive over time.
     
CharlesS
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 11, 2009, 03:26 AM
 
HDDs currently have economies of scale working for them. SSDs don't. That's gonna change after a while.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
Simon  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 11, 2009, 03:44 AM
 
Originally Posted by CharlesS View Post
HDDs currently have economies of scale working for them. SSDs don't. That's gonna change after a while.
It sure will. And I look forward to that day.

Until then, I'll have to find an excuse to get that 7200.4 even though I just got the 7200.3.
     
CharlesS
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 11, 2009, 03:58 AM
 
Nothing wrong with that. Meanwhile. I'll use SSDs as my excuse not to get that 7200.4.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
Simon  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 11, 2009, 04:05 AM
 
Originally Posted by CharlesS View Post
Meanwhile. I'll use SSDs as my excuse not to get that 7200.4.
Hehe.
     
hwojtek
Forum Regular
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: a small village in western Poland
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 11, 2009, 01:17 PM
 
Originally Posted by Simon View Post
At 9.5mm thickness it will fit any MB or MBP.
And Mac Mini as well. With a C2D processor and this HDD, it may become a really useful HTPC.
Wojtek

All Macs still running: iMac G3 Trayloader 333MHz, iMac G3 350 MHz, iMac G4, PM G4 DP 1.6 GHz, 2 x eMac 1 GHz, PBG4 12" 1.5 GHz, Mac SuperMini™ C2D 2.33GHz/802.11n/200GB, Mac Pro Quad Core 2.0 GHz/4GB.
     
Rumor
Moderator
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: on the verge of insanity
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 14, 2009, 05:22 AM
 
I went to get one from Newegg, and the product is deactivated.
I like my water with hops, malt, hops, yeast, and hops.
     
ghporter
Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 14, 2009, 11:39 AM
 
Originally Posted by Rumor View Post
I went to get one from Newegg, and the product is deactivated.
...Which could mean that they're just out of stock without a "get well" date... This drive sounds so good, I'll bet that demand has been "beyond expectations."

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
Rumor
Moderator
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: on the verge of insanity
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 14, 2009, 03:02 PM
 
Amazon is out as well. I should have grabbed one earlier this week.
I like my water with hops, malt, hops, yeast, and hops.
     
besson3c
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: yes
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 14, 2009, 04:00 PM
 
I ask again: are there any prerequisites for 7200 RPM drives, such as bus speeds?
     
Tomchu
Mac Elite
Join Date: Sep 2005
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 14, 2009, 08:33 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Are there any hardware prereqs to make full use of 7200 RPMs?
No. Going from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM will improve both seek times and sequential transfer rates, and out of those two, only the transfer rate could possibly be limited by the bus -- but the bump in transfer rates is not large enough that SATA150/ATA100 couldn't handle it.
     
ghporter
Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 14, 2009, 09:13 PM
 
As long as the interface is there, the drive should run. Like a scalded dog, to use the vernacular. I think that at any time a drive gets "too fast" for the interface, that's time for the interface standard to be expanded. Not that this would be necessary for the drive to work, if ATA is any indicator of how these things work, then the "fast" drive on a not-quite-as-fast interface would simply max out the interface and run slower than its potential.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
Simon  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 15, 2009, 06:07 AM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
I ask again: are there any prerequisites for 7200 RPM drives, such as bus speeds?
The reason nobody replied is because the answer's given in the thread. This drive peaks around 100MBps, and that's faster than any other existing 2.5" 7200 rpm HDD. The SATA bus in your Mac is either 1.5Gbps or 3Gbps. IOW both are more than sufficient.
( Last edited by Simon; Feb 15, 2009 at 06:14 AM. )
     
CharlesS
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 15, 2009, 01:11 PM
 
100 MBps? So it's only just now that the speed of the FireWire 800 bus has been saturated by a 2.5" drive?

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
mduell
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 15, 2009, 04:00 PM
 
Originally Posted by CharlesS View Post
100 MBps? So it's only just now that the speed of the FireWire 800 bus has been saturated by a 2.5" drive?
Does FW800 allow you to use alpha mode at S800 speed? I thought you had to use beta mode.
     
CharlesS
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 15, 2009, 05:08 PM
 
Originally Posted by mduell View Post
Does FW800 allow you to use alpha mode at S800 speed? I thought you had to use beta mode.
AFAIK you have to use beta mode, but I'm a little confused what that has to do with this.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
mduell
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 16, 2009, 02:22 PM
 
Originally Posted by CharlesS View Post
AFAIK you have to use beta mode, but I'm a little confused what that has to do with this.
Beta mode uses 8B10B encoding so the max bandwidth is 78.6MBps, which laptop drives hit a generation or two ago.
     
Spheric Harlot
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: 888500128, C3, 2nd soft.
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 16, 2009, 03:49 PM
 
Am I getting this right?

8b10b is used to minimise generation of cable noise to other devices and because it's somehow easier/safer to implement over DC power, as in a Firewire bus?
(Can you shed any light on why this is so? The wiki article didn't go into the actual technical reasons.)

Max bandwidth of FW800 is 786Mbps, which would normally translate to 96MBps (at 8 bits per byte), but since 8B10B encoding actually encodes each byte into 10 bits, it effectively limits the bus to 76.8MBps, right?
     
mduell
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 17, 2009, 10:05 PM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
Am I getting this right?

8b10b is used to minimise generation of cable noise to other devices and because it's somehow easier/safer to implement over DC power, as in a Firewire bus?
(Can you shed any light on why this is so? The wiki article didn't go into the actual technical reasons.)

Max bandwidth of FW800 is 786Mbps, which would normally translate to 96MBps (at 8 bits per byte), but since 8B10B encoding actually encodes each byte into 10 bits, it effectively limits the bus to 76.8MBps, right?
8B/10B minimizes DC bias by avoiding strings with a lot of 0s or 1s; you never have more than six of either in a byte. It also helps with clock recovery because you never have more than five 0s or 1s in a row. It's used many of the current high-speed busses (SATA, PCIe, etc; DVI/HDMI also encodes 8 bits in 10 but uses a different scheme).

Yes, you have the right math for 1394b S800 bandwidth.
     
Simon  (op)
Posting Junkie
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: in front of my Mac
Status: Offline
Reply With Quote
Feb 18, 2009, 04:20 AM
 
The original BareFeats page has been updated with the WD Scorpio Black 320GB results. The Black does very well for small random writes. The Momentus remains throughput champion.

CONCLUSION
The Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB notebook drive sets a new standard for large sustained transfers and storage space -- yet it's only 9.5mm thick.
...
One of the reasons for our redo of this article was to add in the Western Digital Scorpio Black drive. Like other WD drives we've tested recently, it beats the other brands in overall small random performance.
     
 
Thread Tools
 
Forum Links
Forum Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Top
Privacy Policy
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 04:41 AM.
All contents of these forums © 1995-2017 MacNN. All rights reserved.
Branding + Design: www.gesamtbild.com
vBulletin v.3.8.8 © 2000-2017, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.,