Hitachi GST Travelstar 7K200 HTS722020K9SA00 (0A50940) 200GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s 2.5″ Notebook Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: This is a sweet drive. Runs a tiny bit cooler than my old drive, doesn’t draw more power, doesn’t seem to make any more noise. And Oh yeah, its 200gb (186gb in practice).

Cons: Only 3 out of 4 screws lined up with my laptop’s mounting bracket. No biggie, its snug in there anyhow.

Overall Review: Here are the marks (HD Tune):

My old 5k100 60GB: max 34 MB/s, avg 27.6MB/s, 16.8 ms, heated up to 51C.

7k200: max 50 MB/s, avg 45 MB/s, 15.2 ms, 50C heat.

Pros: This drive is awesome. True it is a litlle louder than the stock 5400 rpm drive but its much faster and i get relatively the same amount of battery life out of the laptop that i used to. currently the drive is in a Acer Aspire 9300 and the performance difference was definitely noticeable.
I ran vista on this laptop for a month or so and i thought it was going to kill my HDD with all the thrashing it was doing. XP also thrashes the HDD but not nearly as much, i can actually sleep with this laptop running at the head of my bed. right now it serves as my night time mp3 player and alarm clock.

Cons: none really, and for those of you who think its too loud, your overreacting to a relatively small problem. its a little louder than your stock 5400 rpm but ten times faster. The HDD only gets warm when lots of work is being done(ie. gaming, video rendering, folding, etc.) other than doing that you should be fine and not notice any extreme heats issues that other people complain about. The price is a bit on the high side but having the space is definitely worth money.

Overall Review: If you plan on running vista be prepared to be up all night listening to the HDD thrash and thrash and thrash. At least that was my exp with vista. i have since gone back to XP and have not had any problems with this HDD. If you store all your business work on your laptop make sure to backup to an external HDD at least once a week or more often. HDD’s are funny entities some live a long time and some don’t.

Pros: A snap to install in a new MacBook. Installed Leopard from scratch without a hitch. Silent. No discernable heat. MacBook is visibly faster when starting up applications. Nice to have lots more space than the stock 80Gb drive AND faster due to 7200 RPM and 16 Mb cache.

Cons: None!

Overall Review: This is the laptop drive for the best combination of performance and capacity. But — 320Gb drives are out now, with 500Gb due by 2009, but so far they are only 5400 RPM with 8 Mb cache. Nice to know there’s room for expansion if needed. By the way, if you want to copy your old disk directly, I highly recommend Apricorn’s DriveWire product — see my Newegg review under that product.

Pros: Vista Rating: 5.5, compared to a wd scorpio 160bevs which scored 4.7 (Just as reference, not sure how good vista’s rating methods are)

I did a clone with ghost…after a little trial and error, I got it. Make sure to not select a drive letter. Vista also wanted to run check disk on first reboot with new drive. Went fine.

Cons: A tad bid warm, no problems.

Overall Review: I haven’t had this drive long enough to know reliability. I don’t think anyone has yet.

Configured vista to page out the swap file to both drives in laptop, haven’t run any comparisons (starting large programs) Not sure if vista will choose to even page it out to the second slower drive.

Pros: Well, I’ve had this only a week but love it. Installed in a Panasonic Toughbook CF-74, replacing a 5400 rpm Seagate.

I can’t believe how much faster this is than the 5400 rpm Seagate I’ve been using.

It also runs cool and quiet. I know it runs cool because when I formatted it via USB connection, I deliberately did not select quick format, which took quite a while to complete. I then cloned the existing drive onto this new one, again via USB cable, and again the clone took a long time. I could feel and hear the naked disk and was very impressed at how cool and quiet it was during formatting and cloning.

Upon installation into the laptop, no spin noise and no vibration,
and very little sound from the seek-arm moving.

After installation, Speedtest showed pristine S.M.A.R.T data and rated the disk at 100% quality and 100% performance.

At this point only time will tell if this is as good as all of the rest of the Hitachi 2.5″ drives I have installed.

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: A year and a half ago, I had tried a Seagate Momentus 7200 rpm drive for this laptop, and the thing was awful. Really noisy and vibrated awfully, like it was out of balance. I hated the way my laptop vibrated from the thing, and sent it back to Newegg, and was really turned off to 7200 rpm drives for laptops.

I’m really glad I gave the 7200 rpms another chance.

(I’ve also had other, new 5400 rpm Seagate laptop drives die within weeks, so I’m going to stick exclusively with Hitachi drives for laptops from now on. I still like Seagate 3.5″ drives, though. They seem to be quite good devices.)

Another thought is that if you get a disk that vibrates really badly or otherwise is really noisy when you first activate it or soon thereafter, then the disk is defective and should be exchanged immediately.

Pros: What can I say? This thing is sweet! Installed this on my Thinkpad x60 when the drive first came out, and saw a VERY noticable difference in performace. HDTune shows Avg Transfer of 49.0 MB/sec, Max of 66.6 MB/sec, burst transfer of 74.2. No noticable difference in power consumtion. Very Quiet if you set it to be. Oh, and it’s 200gb.

Cons: Does not seem to come with laptops, which I find to be foolish of manufacturers.

Overall Review: You can download a bootdisk/cd from hitachi that lets you change settings, most importantly the Power settings (e.g. Low RPM idle -> Active Idle) and Noise Reduction. Noise reduction is VERY effective, but comes at a slight cost in terms of access time (I find this is noticable only in synthetic benchmarks).

Note, people complain that its not actually 200gb, but 186. This is not a format thing, but depends on your definition of a GB. Manufacturers say 1gb=1billion bytes, Windows says 1gb=1024mb x 1024kb etc. In short, multiply any drive’s size by about 0.93 to get the accurate size.

Pros: I’ve been through dozens of laptop hard drives, and this is by far the fastest. Very quiet to boot. Check the net for benchmarks, you will have a hard time finding a faster laptop hard drive.

Cons: Always would like more space.

Overall Review: Contrary to other reviews, this drive is compatible with Core 2 Duos and Windows XP. Most likely the other reviewer had motherboard/controller issues. I’ve used it with XP, Vista, and Mac OS for many months with zero problems.

Pros: Definitely faster than the 5400 RPM brothers, actually performs at a comparable speed to a RAID 0 configuration. In Vista Ultimate x64 scores 5.4. Easy installation, no problems what-so-ever.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: Need capacities above 200GB.