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Seagate momentus XT vs Hitachi Travelstar 7K500

M

Matbookpro

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 31, 2010
34
0
I am waiting for my 15" i7 macbook pro to arrive, and I'm looking at which 7200 rpm hard drive to buy to replace the 5400 rpm one with.

I've narrowed it down to the Seagate momentus xt and the Hitachi Travelstar 7k500.

Not only speed is important, because from what I've read the Seagate is a bit faster. But what i'm more worried about is noise, vibrations, heat and battery life.

Which would get me the closest in those aspects to the default hd but faster?

I know there are a lot of threads about this, but I couldn't find one just comparing the two in the aspects I mentioned.
 
I have the Momentus XT in the same laptop that you are buying. Noticed very little noise or vibration. Very noticeable speed difference when OS X is loaded (apps seem to load much faster) but disappointing in the actual boot up time - hardly any difference between it and the Seagate that was in there originally.
 
I just installed an XT in my i5 yesterday. No noise or vibration so far and boot time is was getting faster each time I rebooted. Huge difference in the speed of apps opening.
 
...at double the price of most 7200 rpm HDD's these days that's a good chunk of change toward a real SSD...

I'd save your $$ and put an optibay with SSD and the larger HDD if you need all that space...

Otherwise, I'd just go with a real SSD of a smaller size... I have a WD scorpio blue SSD in my eeePC below and I'm trying to decide between my (NIB) Intel G2 80Gb SSD in my whitebook or getting an OWC drive and putting the Intel into my win7 box or selling it?...
 
I'm using Hitachi and I think its great, judging from the response, I think both the Seagate and Hitachi will perform about the same.

Yeah, if you truly want to see a noticeable change, SSD is the only way to go (I'll go for OWC SSDs).
 
I see a very noticeable change with the XT. It is much cheaper than an SSD, the small premium is worth it.

The only thing I would recommend is not to do the firmware update if the drive works well out of the box (I regret it because I later found out that apparently the drive does not spin down at all anymore).
 
Supposedly the 7K500 vibrates much less than the Momentus 7200.4 that the Momentus XT is based off of.

From looking at the benchmarks, the XT does not measure up to an SSD in any task that requires random access or anything that accesses data outside of the SSD portion of the drive.

I would suggest that buy the 7K500 or the 500GB Scorpio Black, use the ~$50 that you saved, and put it towards a small capacity SSD. Intel X-25M 80GBs cost around $200 and the Vertex 2 60GB costs about $175. The Vertex 2 has slightly better read speeds than the X-25M and much better write speeds than the Intel drive. Then you can install the SSD in the main HDD bay and install the HDD in an Optibay equivalent.
 
The point of the XT is not the ramdom access, but the nearly instantaneous access to the commonly read stuff, which is what most consumers notice in an SSD.

If you are not going to remove the optical drive, this is the way to go for affordable good capacity.
 
The SSD part of the Momentus XT will make it a lot faster with recently used applications. The rest will be more or less the same. If you use different apps all the time though, the extra speeds will vary. In the end they're both pretty fast. The XT will feel faster for most people with day-to-day things, but it's also a bit more pricey.

I've been reading up on both for a while now, and there are a lot of reports for both that there's a bit more noise and vibrations. In those same threads though, there are also many people who didn't notice anything at all. They're still (partly) mechanical and 7200RPM though, so there'll be some noise and probably also some vibrations. Whether you'll notice this at all is very personal, depends on your machine and also the environment you work in.
 
C64 said:
The SSD part of the Momentus XT will make it a lot faster with recently used applications. The rest will be more or less the same. If you use different apps all the time though, the extra speeds will vary. In the end they're both pretty fast. The XT will feel faster for most people with day-to-day things, but it's also a bit more pricey.

I've been reading up on both for a while now, and there are a lot of reports for both that there's a bit more noise and vibrations. In those same threads though, there are also many people who didn't notice anything at all. They're still (partly) mechanical and 7200RPM though, so there'll be some noise and probably also some vibrations. Whether you'll notice this at all is very personal, depends on your machine and also the environment you work in.
Click to expand...

I agree. I have read differing reviews about both so it very much depends on you. I had the 7k500 in my old macbook, and I feel it had slightly more noise and vibrations than the stock 5400rpm toshiba. But I didn't mind as the difference in performance was very much noticeable.

On my current mbp, I will soon upgrade to a 7200rpm hdd too, but I am waiting for the dust to settle a bit. I'll wait a month to see how the new batch of 7200rpm drives (500gb black and 7200.5) do. Between the XT and 7k500, I'd get the XT for my own use as I tend to use the same apps daily.
 
The Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 is better.
It's quite, energy efficient, and large storage capacity.
Also, Hitachi is a fairly new brand.
 
i have the new seagate XT in my i7 15", and very little noise, and vibration. Super fast. I haven't tried the hitatchi, i'd be interested in hearing about side by side comparisons.
 
I switched from an Intel M-25 G2 160gb SSD to the 500gb Seagate Momentus XT. Here are my takes:
- The XT is significantly slower than the 160gb SSD. I've seen more beachballs to show that my Macbook Pro i5 15" is thinking than ever before. Even with reboots, there is still a significant difference in speed
- Battery life has taken a hit. I'm not sure by how much, but it's more than 10%

However, I still love the Momentus XT:
- The price difference is substantial. I've used the Intel SSD for an year and plan to sell it for $350 or so on eBay. The XT cost around $100. Better SSDs are probably coming for cheaper prices by end of the year
- Mac OSX doesn't support trim. I never noticed performance degradation with the SSD, but the XT doesn't need MAC OSX to stay quick. I'd feel better about the SSD if there was some OSX support
- The extra size is fantastic. 500gb is great for all my video needs and should be perfect for a good size bootcamp partition. With 160gb, I ended up using virtualbox instead. Now I can dedicate about 100gb to a Windows 7 boot camp partition and still be happy.

A great SSD is the single biggest performance boost out there right now. However, the Momentus XT is a good performer that will last until the next round of cheaper, better SSDs come out. I have no regrets about my switch.
 
Intel's G3 SSDs that are coming out later this year should be much cheaper than current SSDs. I would be surprised if they aren't faster than just about any current consumer SSD that's on the market today.
 
im currently looking for a 500gb hdd for my mbp .. i was set on getting the xt but im unsure now .. i dont really feel like shelling out 300+ for an ssd
 
I disagree. That is not good chunk of change toward an SSD. It is about $70. I don't agree with your recommendation either. And you contradict yourself. I own SSDs and a Seagate XT.

J&JPolangin said:
...at double the price of most 7200 rpm HDD's these days that's a good chunk of change toward a real SSD...

I'd save your $$ and put an optibay with SSD and the larger HDD if you need all that space...

Otherwise, I'd just go with a real SSD of a smaller size... I have a WD scorpio blue SSD in my eeePC below and I'm trying to decide between my (NIB) Intel G2 80Gb SSD in my whitebook or getting an OWC drive and putting the Intel into my win7 box or selling it?...
Click to expand...
 
Just put an Seagate Momentus 7200.4 in my 15" Macbook pro, picked it up because it was the only 500gb available locally and was a good price at 69.99. Wasn't expecting much but am quite pleased, drive is quiet, fast and works great. Can't tell any difference from stock as far as noise or vibration goes, if anything it's less than stock. Was a perceptable increase in speed as well although how much I couldn't tell you, would likely need a benchmarking program to discern the difference between any of these drives nowadays.

Cheers
 
I can't justify SSD at its current price point (about $2-3 per gigabyte), so I opted for the Hitachi Travelstar 7200RPM, 500GB. It's not a quiet drive - not abnormally loud, but louder than the 5400 for sure - but it's fast enough for what I need it to do.

I considered the Momentus XT but then realized that for what I do, the 4GB cache isn't going to do any good. A lot of my work is dealing with VMs that are over 50GB in size each. I also do a lot of video editing and music editing. I really do need a solid state drive to get any benefit above and beyond the platter drive. Problem then is the capacity: My calculation is that I would need at least 250GB total capacity in order to sustain what I'm currently doing, and that's stretching it. There's no way though that I am paying more than $300 AT THE MOST for that capacity. I also get nervous about the potential battery loss as revealed by Tom's Hardware.
 
looks to be (on Newegg.com):

$74.99 - HITACHI Travelstar 7K500 HD20500 IDK/7K 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache
$129.99 - Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache

difference of $55

$1,439.00 - Kingston SSDNow V+ Series SNVP325-S2B/512GB 2.5" 512GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Big difference...
 
I've seen a Sony with 128gb ssd before. I doubt it was even one of the vaunted intel SSDs with TRIM. It was a Samsung or something.

Anyway, the computer was blazing fast. Full reboots were more akin to coming out of standby or sleep mode, seriously. Apps opened for the first time were opening as fast as apps that were stored in RAM using a normal hard drive. I promise by everything I have that if you get the right SSD, it will make your computer feel faster than any processor upgrade will.

People way overvalue processors. It's the SSD that you should get if you care about everyday performance.
 
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