500GB Laptop drive shoot out!

[Machinesworking]

OK laptop hard drives have come way down in price, (the best are all under $150 now).
I've been doing some research and it's come down to these two! (feel free to suggest others of course)

500GB Seagate Momentus XT - has 4GB of flash memory on it, speeds up load times etc.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product


500GB Western Digital Scorpio Black - It's predecessor the 320GB model was considered the fastest over all drive for laptops, and WD are usually solid!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136692


The XT is more expensive even on sale, and gets mixed reviews, some people rave about it, others say it can have spin down issues, not sure how that would affect Live?
For a primary drive it 'seems' like a great choice, though it's new tech. I'm tempted to go with it, but hesitant. One Digital Performer user I know loves it, Gearslutz not so much, but it's Gearslutz.....

Thoughts?

[Pasha]

It might be me but I had horror stories with Western Digital, hence my vote goes to Seagate (never broke one in 20 years).
However it might be me... I like the 4GB Flash on the Seagate.

[Machinesworking]

It might be me but I had horror stories with Western Digital, hence my vote goes to Seagate (never broke one in 20 years).
However it might be me... I like the 4GB Flash on the Seagate.

Do you own it? I'm a little wary because people are posting some that the drive tends to spin down too often.

[Pasha]

It might be me but I had horror stories with Western Digital, hence my vote goes to Seagate (never broke one in 20 years).
However it might be me... I like the 4GB Flash on the Seagate.

Do you own it? I'm a little wary because people are posting some that the drive tends to spin down too often.

No I do not own it.
However I saw an interesting article about how to stop this exaggerating energy saver thing that plagues drives
under Windows. It was here about Mac Pro drives. All resides in the hdparm command from terminal if you're on a Mac.
For Windows there should be other ways which I do not know. Newest drives have Windows optimized energy saving.

- Best
- Pasha

[Pasha]

Here's the link:

http://mymacfixes.blogspot.com/2009/06/ ... -hard.html

[Machinesworking]

Yeah, I'm definitely tempted to go with the Momentus XT.
Typical story though, money is tight. Command line fixes aren't a selling point, but I'm not even certain that's necessary?
Interweb myths like this are common.

[beats me]

500 is still too small for me. I'm waiting for a 1T internal laptop drive with decent rpm. Don't know why it's taking so long.

[slirak]

I bought a new drive just the other day and was really into the Seagate XT, but there's loads of horror stories about random spin down issues (it might spin down even if it's under heavy use, halting everything) and very poor performance after just a few days of use.

Most of these stories seem to be from Mac users and since I'm one, I went with the Scorpio instead. Couldn't find a 500GB on the shelf anywhere though and I was in a hurry and so ended up with the 320.

It way outperforms my stock 5400 rpm Hitachi, but it's turned my formerly dead silent unibody MBP into a hum fest.

I'm actually considering to switch back to my old 5400 drive, praying for a huge price drop for large SSD drives...

[glitchrock-buddha]

500 is still too small for me. I'm waiting for a 1T internal laptop drive with decent rpm. Don't know why it's taking so long.

Why wait?
I've been rocking the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB internal laptop hard drive in my macbook pro for over half a year. Didn't notice any performance difference from the in-built drive it came with, only it's much bigger.

Ah the freedom of a terabyte...

Looks like Samsung and Toshiba have joined the party as well ($120-130 at newegg):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 1&name=1TB

[beats me]

500 is still too small for me. I'm waiting for a 1T internal laptop drive with decent rpm. Don't know why it's taking so long.

Why wait?
I've been rocking the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB internal laptop hard drive in my macbook pro for over half a year. Didn't notice any performance difference from the in-built drive it came with, only it's much bigger.

Ah the freedom of a terabyte...

Looks like Samsung and Toshiba have joined the party as well ($120-130 at newegg):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 1&name=1TB

I've got a 640G WD drive in my MBP that's 5400 rpm which I was thinking might be part of the reason I get slow load times and glitches with Live. The 1T WD drive (and I've had good luck with WD drives in general) is even slower so I didn't want to risk it.

You're probably going to find complaints about any drive manufacturer and since I've had good luck with WD drives I am somewhat hesitant about switching teams.

[glitchrock-buddha]

500 is still too small for me. I'm waiting for a 1T internal laptop drive with decent rpm. Don't know why it's taking so long.

Why wait?
I've been rocking the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB internal laptop hard drive in my macbook pro for over half a year. Didn't notice any performance difference from the in-built drive it came with, only it's much bigger.

Ah the freedom of a terabyte...

Looks like Samsung and Toshiba have joined the party as well ($120-130 at newegg):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 1&name=1TB

I've got a 640G WD drive in my MBP that's 5400 rpm which I was thinking might be part of the reason I get slow load times and glitches with Live. The 1T WD drive (and I've had good luck with WD drives in general) is even slower so I didn't want to risk it.

You're probably going to find complaints about any drive manufacturer and since I've had good luck with WD drives I am somewhat hesitant about switching teams.

Yeah, understood. I took a chance and got the WD 5200 1TB drive because at the time it was the only 1TB laptop drive. And ofr what it's worth, I haven't noticed anything being slower than my previous 500gb 5400 drive. Also, the samsung and toshiba drives are 5400, and they've gotten good reviews so far. For 130 bucks, it's damn worth having all that space. Back everything up with time machine and even if you have bad luck, you can send the drive back and recover everything.

[slirak]

Here's the link:

http://mymacfixes.blogspot.com/2009/06/ ... -hard.html

Wow, that's scary!!! My drive doesn't click but it had the same excess load cycle count as others have reported - a rate that would shorten the drive's life to about a year!

I've applied the fix in the article, just hope it'll work. I'll be monitoring the load cycle count carefully the next few days I tell you. Thanks for pointing this out Pasha!

[oblique strategies]

Storage Review:

Leaderboard - Best Hard Drives & SSDs
http://www.storagereview.com/best_drives

Storage Reference Guide:
http://www.storagereview.com/storage_reference_guide

[Machinesworking]

Storage Review:

Leaderboard - Best Hard Drives & SSDs
http://www.storagereview.com/best_drives

Storage Reference Guide:
http://www.storagereview.com/storage_reference_guide

Cool info, but they do no comparison between the Scorpio and the XT, which is my main question.

The XT just went on sale, so I'm even more tempted.

[leedsquietman]

I have a 500 GB WD Scorpio in my Dell XPS1530 laptop and it's performance is excellent.