Thanks a bunch for the review! It came *just* in time to support a choice I was making and a few of the arguments to do so.
1 - 5400RPM or 7200RPM; according to the stories, in real day-to-day usage the difference is really significant! So the premium for higher RPM is worth it.
2 - power usage; 2,0W or 2,5W is not going to seriously impact how long the battery lasts.
3 - heat; well... I live in a temperate climate, so that's not much of a consideration.
4 - sound; I'm using a Tecra S3 which is (somewhat??) noisy, so the HDD will not produce more than the fan.
5 - testresults such as they are: it *seems* that the Scorpio Black (320GB) has a (slight) edge over the Seagate, but I've read tests with the opposite results as well.
I've owned both Seagates, Western Digitals and Deskstars (3,5 inch all) and each seems reliable, but *all* have failed on me one time or another (catastrophic, needing replacement).

*IF* the Seagate was available, I would have to think longer, now I can go with what's for sale and tops the scores here. Either way, it's going to outperform my present Toshiba 100GB/5400RPM/SATA1 .... I hope :-)

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=12452

Supertalent MX updates available... but if you already have one, you need to RMA it for the new firmware.

Excellent review as usual.

I guess it all depends on the application the device housing the drive is used for.

I would guess for most people with a single all purpose laptop, having the largest, fast drive, would be the way to go, as a oppsed to the smaller, fastest drive available. That is not even taking into account the cost factor.

300+ gigs in a single drive for notebook would be fine by me.
I would hate to lose 200+ gigs of space for a bit more speed at a much higher price.

Greetings!

I have a doubt.

Looking to the test system of this review I can see the platform used is identical to the one used in the VelociRaptor review:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079/3
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14964

So, how come all the mechanical 2,5" HDs boot faster than a VelociRaptor by 6-9 seconds?
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079/6
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14964/4

Anyone?

I like the graph color-coding. Big, bold, distinct bars. Good job!

These things are just so stunningly faster than what is in the EeePCs. Yeah those mininotes contain "SSDs" but the write speed is so abysmal (drops to ~400KB/s on the smallest files) and read speed is, at max, 30MB/s with a UDMA66 link. The machine literally pauses for a few seconds when working on small files.

It's a strange thing, because for other operations they can be very snappy with their decent read rates and near-instant access times. Loading game levels is very quick, but saving a game can take 5 seconds, something that doesn't even have a delay when you are running on a HDD. Been playing Unreal on it and seeing that.

They are more like cheap flash sticks than the SSDs that got reviewed here. Of course, I suppose that the cost of the hardware is the obvious difference.

Right on the first page, you should differentiate between GB and GiB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#IEC_standard_prefixes

What on earth?

P4, ICH7?

Should at least test with an ICH9 board, if not ICH10. Would be nice if you could do that and post an update if there's a difference..

I have to say that for me, once SSD drives hit 128MB, i will take the plunge. I am not convinced that MLC based flash drives are FAIL. I am really curious what that new firmware will accomplish in terms of performance.

Diss, do you plan a follow up on that ?

Thanks,

Adi

Great review. As usual.

Part of me wants to see what RAID0 or RAID5 arrays with SSD's would be like. Then I think about how much it would cost and it gets a lot less exciting. Certainly the writing is on the wall for traditional HD's. It's a matter of when, not if they will eventually replace regular HD's.

Considering how much more complicated HD's are compared to SSD's you'd think that sooner or later economies of scale should kick in and the price should fall dramatically?

It's fun to think about what "hard drives" will be like when it's ALL SSDs. Will the 1.8 or 2.5" format prevail? Will it be something much different?

Will holographic memory ever get more real ala minority report and 2001?

I'll consider SSD when they are across the board 30% faster in all benchmarks and less than 30% more expensive than mechanical drives.

It will happen but I don't think it will be for still another 3 years at least.

although it's a year old, i wonder how the travelstar 7k200 would've compared on the same setup:

it seemed to do alright at storagereview:

http://www.storagereview.com/leaderboard.sr

Nice review as usual, Geoff. If prices and capacities continue to progress at current rates, I can see SSDs taking over the laptop market in the next few years except for the real budget end perhaps.

One suggestion - it would be useful to have a desktop drive added to the benchmarks to give a sense of perspective. Something like the WD Caviar 640GB that you've already reviewed for example, and perhaps the Velociraptor as well. I can easily imagine upgrading to a SSD as a Windows/applications drive in a year or two when the prices have plummeted further, so it would be nice to see how they compare to the best desktop drives.

IOMeter's multi-user workloads aren't particularly applicable to notebook environments, but with many rackmount servers switching to 2.5" drives, these tests are more appropriate than you might think.

Nnnnnot really. Perhaps for the SSDs, but then these aren't the SSDs you'd see in racks either. And definitely not for the mechanical drives. You've tested notebook drives spinning at up to 7200 rpm, tuned for power saving and desktop-type workloads, at high areal density. Rackmounts use thicker (12.5 mm vs 9.5 mm), faster-spinning (10,000 or 15,000 rpm), less dense (73 GB a platter rather than 125 GB or 160 GB), seek-tuned SAS drives whose performance characteristics are nothing like the drives you've been testing, and for good reason.

Those server-related testing suites prove why SSDs are going to render high RPM HDDs obsolete once GB/$$$ ratio becomes more reasonable and reliability proven for business to adopt them.

BTW, excellent, thorough review Geoff. Do not let the sumo crush you again. ;)

I wonder how two of the Supertalent MX drives would do in RAID0. That should help the write performance and given the prices it would be twice the GB/$.

Solid review and comparison, as expected from TR. Clearly, SLC based SSDs are way to go. I have personally tested several SSD solutions using both SLC and MLC chips for my UMPC and MLC ones were outright unusable. The allure of cheapness was never worth it. If you're strapped for cash, traditional HDDs are still your pick. If you can indulge in some burning of disposable income, look no less than SLC-based SSD.

I might be one of the few that would like to see it but I would have been interested in benchmarks involving of a good size compile/build. From what I have seen the bottleneck is generally disk IO, and it would have been interesting to see what impact these faster SSD drives might have on something like that.

However good review.

I'm disappointed to not see Hitachi's 7200 RPM drive in this review. Hitachi has always outperformed Seagate in 2.5" 7200 RPM drives, and I would have liked to see how WD managed to do against the leader.

Benchmarks are great for comparison, but what about the subjective tests of using the laptop under real use? Did you notice apps opening faster, overall snappy response times, etc?

I'm planning on picking up an MSI Wind and a 32gig Samsung SSD drive to slap in it. Did you happen to weigh the drives and see if the SSD drives are lighter than the mechanical ones or not?

Oh man, where was this a week ago! I couldn't find any reviews on the Scorpio Black but I took a chance. Glad I made the right decision!

I'm glad to see the 320gbs getting cheaper and faster. Solid state looks interesting, but it has a ways to go before the loss of size makes up for the increase in speed and decrease of power draw.

Man, those SuperTalent performance numbers are downright laughable in some parts. What happened? Is that the cost of multi-bit gates, or is there some other significant hardware departure I didn't catch?

Also, I think the true drama was the slugfest between the Momentus 5400 and the Scorpio Blue. These are the only "affordable" hard drives in this roundup (using the term loosely, since I'm unemployed), and so I was paying attention to their performance respective strictly to each other. I was rooting for the Momentus since it was cheaper, and I like Seagate, but when it came down to it the WD Blue won more rounds than the Momentus. I WILL note however, that the Momentus does fair a bit better in the very-important arena of power consumption.

That said, I would agree with Geoff that the Scorpio Blue is overall a better value than the Momentus 5400 and worth the extra 30 or so dollars…

…now if only I could find a-hundred-and-ten bucks…