2.5 Inch Hard Drive - New Hitachi High Speed Experience and Questions

I recently purchased a new Hitachi 500GB drive to replace an old drive in a 2009 mid year MacBook. I’m impressed with the seemingly incredible performance of the drive, but have some questions.

The original drive was OEM and it was a Fujitsu MHZ2160BH FFS G1 which was a 160GB drive that came with the system. Recently I started getting slow-downs with it so I used Scannerz to perform a drive test on it. Scannerz found a few, not many, bad blocks and a bunch of weak sectors surrounding them. Their manual include some instructions to use Disk Utility to reformat and zero the drive which may or may not fix the problems. This drive is already five years old, so I just figured why waste time on trying to repair something that’s really old enough it might be on its way out anyway.

I considered replacing it with an SSD but the prices for comparable or bigger drives really can’t be warranted on a MacBook this old because they really aren’t worth that much any more - you can get them on eBay in good condition for about $200 or less. The system, however, still works fine. Only the drive is having problems and that’s after five years.

I did some searching and found an Hitachi HGST HTS725050A7E630 on sale locally for just over $50. Its a 500GB HD SATA 7200 RPM drive. I included a bunch of links for stuff mentioned here at the bottom of this post. You can see the specs there.

In any case, I wanted to make sure the new drive was OK so I installed it and started a scan on it using Scannerz. I figured this would take hours to run so I started the scan, left for a few minutes while I got soda, and thought I’d make one last check before leaving it alone to do the test on the drive. I figured when I got back Scannerz would have gone through about 4 or 5 GB, but instead it was at about 12 GB. I thought something was wrong.

I started a retest and the drive was hauling like I’d never seen an actual hard drive move before. I thought maybe the big cache was fooling Scannerz, so I got a copy Black Magic Disk Speed Test and was really, really surprised to see how fast this thing is. Scannerz tests for errors and other problems, so it doesn’t report speed data directly.

I expected to see a performance improvement, but I expected the improvement be caused by the rotational speed of the drive. The old Fujitsu drive ran at 5400 RPM and the new Hitachi runs at 7200. I expected the improvement to be on the order of 7200/5400.

What I did was a set of tests on both the old Fujitsu and the new Hitachi. I also used an old program named Xbench to get some results. It’s quite old but if you use only the disk testing mode it still works. In any case, here’s what I got results wise:

NEW HITACHI:

Time to do 0-10 GB scan using Scannerz: 1 min 13.93 sec (73.93 sec)

Black Magic Disk Speed Test Write speed: 116.1 MB/sec

Black Magic Disk Speed Test Read speed: 120.8 MB/sec

Xbench Uncached Write (256K blocks): 117.29 MB/sec

Xbench Uncached Read (256K blocks): 96.86 MB/sec

OLD FUJITSU:

Time to do 0-10 GB scan using Scannerz: 2 min 39.65 sec (159.65 sec)

Black Magic Disk Speed Test Write speed: 47.5MB/sec

Black Magic Disk Speed Test Read speed: 46.6 MB/sec

Xbench Uncached Write (256K blocks): 37.44 MB/sec

Xbench Uncached Read (256K blocks): 44.67 MB/sec

These obviously aren’t SSD speeds, but considering the price and the fact I now have a 500GB new drive, the speed difference is impressive. The tests aren’t averages, they’re just one shots to see how big the difference was. I suppose if I wanted to do a real test I’d take lots of measurements and do averages, but the differences are obvious and far exceed the 7200/5400 ratio I thought I’d see.

Some other notes:

1. The Hitachi is incredibly thin. DO NOT PUSH ON IT’S CASE AT ALL! I had a friend that did that and he ruined the drive. You’re not supposed to do that anyway, but in this case it absolutely has to be taken seriously. Handle it only by the edges.

2. The Hitachi drive has an “AF” label on it indicating it’s using 4K sectors natively but emulating 512 byte sectors. At least that’s what I think it means. I’m not sure if this is why the performance difference is so high.

3. Some people have questioned whether or not the 7200 RPM drives would cause heating and fans coming on in some posts. From my experience with this disk, the answer is a definite “no.” In fact I’d say fans on the system come on less.

4. If you look for one of these, make sure you get the right model number. Hitachi was making an earlier version with an 8 MB buffer instead of a 32MB buffer like this one has. I have no idea how that drive performs compared to this one. I assume this is Hitachi’s latest and greatest.

What I would like to know is why the speed difference? In use this thing is surprising fast. Obviously not as fast as an SSD but for 50 bucks and 500GB of storage I can’t complain. Is it because of the advanced format or is there some other technology at play?

Any comments are welcome, particularly those that may tell me whether we can see HDs continue to get even faster.

Links:

New Hitachi HD specs:http://www.hgst.com/hard-drives/mobile-drives/7mm-thin-and-light-drives/travelst ar-z7k500

Specs for old Fujitsu: http://vb.net/products/FUJITSU/fujMHZfam_ds.pdf

Scannerz: http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html

Black Magic Speed Test: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12

Xbench: http://www.xbench.com

Xbench seems to have been sort of abandoned since Tiger but if you uncheck all the options except the drive testing option it can still report.