Fujitsu announces world's first 320GB laptop disk to spin at 7200rpm

Take that WD, Toshiba, and Hitachi. Fujitsu just returned from exile with a claim to the biggest fastest laptop-disk throne. The 3Gbps SATA-equipped MHZ2 BJ series measures in at a standard 9.5-mm and spins at 7,200rpm with a 16MB cache and 25dB idle noise level. Average seek times are listed at 10.5-ms for data reads and 12.5-ms for writes while drawing 2.3 watts of power. Oh sure, a couple of 2.5-inch 500GB disk drives have already been announced. But most of those measure in at a non-standard 12.5-mm making them unsuitable for the majority of laptops on the market today. Sales of the new MHZ2 BJ-series begins in June.

Update: Oops, almost forgot about Samsung's Spinpoint M6 which does hit the 500GB mark in a standard 9.5mm-height package.

[Via Impress]

[prateeko @ Mar 24th 2008 2:49AM]

This is great and all, but what about SSD? I mean, do they even know how fast those things spin?!

[tokyo_suicide @ Mar 24th 2008 3:08AM]

SSDs don't spin...

[prateeko @ Mar 24th 2008 3:15AM]

I see my attempt at humor has failed... :'(

[Reader @ Mar 24th 2008 4:07AM]

I heard they spin at one divided by zero...

[ethana2 @ Mar 24th 2008 4:37AM]

Give 'em a run for their money, hard drive people! Fight! Fight! Fight!

[Ian @ Mar 24th 2008 1:47PM]

its ok some of us are smart enough to understand sarcasm..

[happy_penguin @ Mar 24th 2008 2:52AM]

SSD is a long way off from replacing standard hard drives. It's all about density on spinning disks, baby. Yeah!

[ethana2 @ Mar 24th 2008 4:38AM]

It's not all about one thing. Now it's a question of niches, prices, and time.

[Ray @ Mar 24th 2008 2:59AM]

Bravo!

So long after 7K200! Finally!

It sounds to me that Fujitsu and Samsung are pushing the limit of laptop hard drives now instead of Segeate and Hitachi!

Got to catch up! Or the legend of the 7K60/7K200 will really become a old legend :-)

[guerilla779 @ Mar 24th 2008 5:11AM]

u should check out the new SONY HYBRID hard drives (both optical lense and magnetic disk)...........on the same platter they can shove 5 times more storage. dunno if engadget has reported on that or not.

[ClaMs @ Mar 24th 2008 9:14AM]

that "k" in "7K200" was really uncalled for.
"K" is an abbreviation, i.e. to make words shorter.
Y2K is shorter than "Year 2000" = good
"7K200" is longer than "7200" = bad

all your K did was... confuse me for a second. :)

[Ray @ Mar 24th 2008 11:12AM]

7K200 is referring to Hitachi Travelstar 7K200, the Well-Known Current performance king of laptop hard drive.

Google it.

[Bender Bending Rodriguez @ Mar 24th 2008 3:25AM]

That is a 'drive', made up of multiple 'disks'. While I am not pedantic in general conversation I do expect a little more accuracy from tech-related websites.

[Thomas Ricker @ Mar 24th 2008 3:31AM]

If you want to get pedantic, then the word you are actually looking for is "platter." A hard disk drive is typically made of multiple spinning platters.

Regardless, "disk" is the generally accepted short-hand term for referencing hard disk drives in a community of geeks.

Thomas

[craig @ Mar 24th 2008 10:29AM]

While we are being pedantic, Thomas, Fujitsu did not claim in the press release to be introducing the world's fastest laptop drive, only the world's largest 7200 rpm one. You may assume that those two go together but that is your failing.

[Karl Viklund @ Mar 24th 2008 4:14AM]

That's impressive. Now. Think about what a 320 GB SSD would cost. Yea, that much. So forget about SSD until it becomes cheaper.....................

[Norman Speight @ Mar 24th 2008 5:57AM]

Why, oh why would anyone be stupid enough to buy one of these.
Fujitsu, like Hitachi and all the others give you one years guarantee. I buy many many drives. You try invoking even the one year guarantee, Hitachi told me that the 3 month old faulty drive I had (was not purchased from an Authorised dealer' so no warranty etc so I chucked it.
Seagate (and I have no contact with them, only as a customer)do not quibble and you get five years - by who time you should be junking the drive on reliability grounds anyway.
Befer you buy ANYTHING in computing, ask yourself the question - WHAT IF! In fact ask it of those you buy from. I always do. 99% of suppliers are only interested in CURRENT sales. It's a belief in the old 1030s IBM thing "Ir all starts with a sale" What they all fail to see is that "It only continues if next-time buyers have a reason to trust you"
Think I'm wrong? Well would you go back to a shop who had given you the cold shoulder.
No. It all rests, continues etc with really good service. The first sale has bugger all to do with maintaining a business.
Again. I wouldn't touch one of these with a bargepole.

[rock99rock @ Mar 24th 2008 10:44AM]

like, 10 feet of Bargepole?

[Jon Doe. @ Mar 24th 2008 5:20PM]

That's why you get a third party warranty.

[Octothorpe @ Mar 24th 2008 7:06AM]

And this is remarkable how? I am less concerned with the subtle speed increase from 5400 to 7200 RPM than I am with power consumption and overall capacity when it comes to laptop hard drives. I would say that Fujitsu is a day late and a couple hundred gigabytes short for my taste.

[Jon Doe. @ Mar 24th 2008 9:22AM]

Do you ever read hard drive reviews? 5400 vs. 7200 There is a notable difference in performance and what with OS's now thrashing the hard drive to continuously defrag, and index your content (Yes both Vista AND Leopard do this.) having a fast hard drive is more important then ever. As for power consumption I've seen dozens of reviews and they all point to the fact that power consumption in a 5400 vs. 7200 fist fight is negligible at best. The devices that take up the most power now a days are your display and CPU hard drives come in at a distant third....possibly 4th. Not sure how much juice an optical drive pulls now a days.

[craig @ Mar 24th 2008 10:23AM]

Hey Jon, I'd like to see those dozens of reviews you are referring to. 7200 rpm drives use more power, run hotter, and make more noise than 5400 rpm ones.

If the capacities of the two drives were the same, then 7200 rpm would be faster. Capacities are not the same, though, so 7200 rpm is not always faster. The current state of the art for 5400 rpm is 500GB, and capacity advantage alone causes a drive to be faster.

I believe that, for most notebook users, the 500GB drive will be just as fast as this 320GB one will be and it will be quieter, cooler, and more power efficient doing so.

[Phil M @ Mar 24th 2008 2:58PM]

why the heck would the capacity of a hard drive have anything to do with the speed of it, compared to the actual rotation speed?

besides platter density, i can't think of any reason...

[CL @ Mar 24th 2008 3:34PM]

Barefeats did a test with the 7200rpm drives and surprisingly, the 7200rpm drive actually use LESS power than a 5400rpm drive.

http://barefeats.com/hard96.html

[Jon Doe. @ Mar 24th 2008 4:30PM]

Fine. Give me some time to compile a list.

[craig @ Mar 24th 2008 4:51PM]

A higher capacity drive is inherently faster because data is packed more efficiently on the disk. Remember that increasing drive space does not increase the size of the files stored on it. If you are going to consider the real-world performance of two drives, you have to choose a data set that fits on both drives.

The access time of a drive is determined by the sum of the seek time and the rotational delay. Transfer times will be the same for same-generation notebook drives. A faster spinning drive will have lower rotational delay, but that improvement is offset by lower seek times due to the greater data density of the slower spinning drive. This is demonstrated again and again in benchmarks. Trouble is, synthetic disk benchmarks generally test full stroke seeks where this effect will never be seen. They are seen in application benchmarks though. It's not enough to read someone's test results, you have to make an effort to understand them.

Which drive performs better is determined by the disk load but notebook users are rarely running transactional systems where high spindle speeds dominate. Unlike notebook drives, faster desktop and server drives have higher speed data channels. Notebook drives can't afford that due to power constraints. People who harbor prejudice in favor of higher speed notebook drives assume they do more than they actually do. For large block and sequential IO, the slower drive will do just as well if not better. For small block random IO, the 7200 will do better but not by as much as is assumed. Your results will depend on what you do, but increasingly, notebook users who need high performance are those doing content creation work (and that work involves large block IO where 5400 competes well).

There is no way comparing drives of the same generation that the faster spinning drive will consume less power than the slower one. Anyone who believes that is just refusing to think. You can't compare today's 7200 to 5400s from years ago.

[craig @ Mar 24th 2008 5:01PM]

CL, I don't know the age difference between the two drives compared, but if you compare the Hitachi 7K200 to the Hitachi 5K250 (like the WD in their test) you'll find that the 5K drive uses less power. Since notebook drives are more alike in power consumption than they are different, it's not surprising that such a comparison can be found. That doesn't mean it's a trend though. That WD drive's idle power is through the roof.

[Jon Doe. @ Mar 24th 2008 5:01PM]

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.23/23.01/2301LaptopHardDriveSpeed/index.html


http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus5400.2_120gb.pdf

Momentus 5400.2 SATA 1.5Gb/s 100-GB Hard Drive
Startup Current: 1.1w
Seek: 2.2w
Read/Write: 1.9w / 2.3w
Idle/Standby: .80w / .28w

www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus_7200_2.pdf
Momentus 7200.2 SATA 3.0Gb/s 100-GB
Startup Current: 1.1w
Seek: 2.3w
Read/Write: 2.1w / 2.1w (Oh nooes! .2 difference!)
Idle/Standby: .8w / .25w


www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/C51A283F52498251862573FA005A3C98/$file/Travelstar_5K320_DS.pdf
Travelstar 5K320
Startup: 5.0w
Read\Write: 1.8W
low power idle: .55w

www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/A198FEF5A3B22F08862572D400656432/$file/7K200DS.pdf
Travelstar 7K200
Startup: 5.5W
Read\Write: 2.3 (Oh noooes! .5 of a w difference!)
low power idle: .8w

What now? Do you want to me to go out and buy em and pull out a voltmeter?

[craig @ Mar 24th 2008 6:08PM]

"What now? Do you want to me to go out and buy em and pull out a voltmeter?"

No, Jon, I'd just like you to put your facts where your mouth is. You started out claiming "dozens of reviews" and now you offer only one review which does NOT support your claim and did not test power consumption. Neither does your quoted specs from the Seagate docs. Did you really think such a bluff would pass?

Of course, I should expect as much from someone who thinks startup current is spec'ed in watts. You're in over your head.

[Jon Doe. @ Mar 25th 2008 1:13AM]

Not my fault that you can't use google yourself. go to http://www.anandtech.com/ or any other site and as for startup...sorry that I made the mistake of adding w to everything after cutting and pasting. I didn't want to spend the entire day formatting the damn crap. Next you are going to tell me that specs provided by the vendor are useless. Seriously I think it is you who better quit while you are behind. As I originally stated there ARE dozens of reviews out there. from Anand to Tomshardware to several dedicated HD review sites. I think at this point the above specs puts the burden of proof back on you. So what next bitch? Are you just going to tell me you are right because you said so?

[Wwhat @ Mar 25th 2008 5:33PM]

Hey craig, your post are a bit too long, try to condense them and start your own blog for the longer thoughts.

[Michael @ Mar 24th 2008 8:15AM]

Interesting.

[packetsniffer @ Mar 24th 2008 8:27AM]

Me want.

[Gonzalo Garcia @ Mar 24th 2008 8:56AM]

anyway, 320GB@7200RPM isn't bad at all, considering that the same amount of money (i asume this drive costs somewhere around 300USD) cant buy even a small 64 gb SSD.

[Jon Doe. @ Mar 24th 2008 9:12AM]

I just creamed my pants...

[Jon Doe. @ Mar 24th 2008 9:14AM]

Hey does anyone know if Fujitsu offers a good warranty on their hard drives?

[bboxter @ Mar 24th 2008 9:53AM]

"that "k" in "7K200" was really uncalled for.
"K" is an abbreviation, i.e. to make words shorter.
Y2K is shorter than "Year 2000" = good
"7K200" is longer than "7200" = bad"

He meant 7K200 as in the Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 whcih was the biggest 7200 drive before these.

[Guimo @ Mar 24th 2008 11:37AM]

Great, but imho all just placeholders for the inevitable SSD invasion. I won't get a new drive before the SSD goes mainstream.

[frost9960 @ Mar 24th 2008 11:41AM]

gimme gimme gimme!!!

[Christian Martin @ Mar 24th 2008 1:21PM]

I certainly hope the BJ series lives up to its name.

[Kamall @ Mar 26th 2008 9:40PM]

I swore there was a 500gb HDD made in the standard 9.5mm size. Engadget even reported it in a story earlier this year.

[Bender Bending Rodriguez @ Mar 24th 2008 3:27AM]

They did, but those are 5400RPM drives, not the 7200 noted in this blog.

[craig @ Mar 24th 2008 10:16AM]

There have been three 500GB drives announced but only Samsung's is 9.5mm. Samsung is already shipping that drive and has announced a 250GB 7200 rpm drive as well. Frankly, I expect the 500GB 5400 rpm drive to be a better choice than this 320GB one.