Thinkpads Forum

Hope that someone may help with sound arguments to resolve this dilemma.

I got recently X31 with terrific 4200 RPM 30GB drive, so my intention was to replace it with 7k100, however checking *pricewatch* site in my area I found that for only cca 10 bucks more I can get new 5k160.

Now, Im in sweet trouble, 7k100 is great drive, fast, silent, big... I have it in my A31p for more than half of year as system disk and Im very happy with. 5k160 in other hand has slightly higher average seek time 11ms vs 10ms has better power consumption properties (better autonomy on battery) and 60GB more capacity... and as I said costs only ten bucks more. Is 1ms diference in average seeking time noticable?

What you would do, target system is X31.

Specification from Hitachi for 7k100 and 5k160.

So, what you will do in this dilemma?

zone wrote:Now, Im in sweet trouble, 7k100 is great drive, fast, silent, big... I have it in my A31p for more than half of year as system disk and Im very happy with. 5k160 in other hand has slightly higher average seek time 11ms vs 10ms has better power consumption properties (better autonomy on battery) and 60GB more capacity... and as I said costs only ten bucks more. Is 1ms diference in average seeking time noticable?

It's not so much the seek time as the transfer rate -- the 7K100 is 20-25% faster there.

If you expect to need the space, get the 5K160. If you don't know, get the 7K100 as you will get the extra speed every day.

Some useful comparison data...

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25 ... &chart=144

zone wrote:So, what you will do in this dilemma?

I would first of all check what physical space you have in your X31. A colleague of mine has an X-series, I think it might be an X40, and it only takes 1.8" disks. If that's the case the drives you mention won't fit, since they're 2.5".

FragrantHead wrote:it only takes 1.8" disks. If that's the case the drives you mention won't fit, since they're 2.5".

Only the X40 and the X41 use 1.8" disks. All other Thinkpads use 2.5".

Depends on your use. Unless your the type of person who does high IO operations on your laptop, you'd likely benefit more from the 5k160.

So what if your boot time is an extra few seconds, or if a game launches slightly slower. Is it really worth the lower battery life, higher temp, and lower capacity?

If your doing high IO operations, with things like software compiling, engineering apps, etc... then by all means go with the 7200 RPM drive, you'll make good use of it.

But how much of a diff does IO make in your daily usage? For basic computer use (web, email, office) there's no real difference other than the placebo effect.

DIGITALgimpus wrote:Depends on your use. Unless your the type of person who does high IO operations on your laptop, you'd likely benefit more from the 5k160.

Unless you don't need the disk space. My wife has more than 50% free on her 40GB drive ...

DIGITALgimpus wrote:So what if your boot time is an extra few seconds, or if a game launches slightly slower. Is it really worth the lower battery life, higher temp, and lower capacity?

As far as the battery life and temp go, the power consumption difference is 0.3-0.4W. An X31 will have a typical battery-operated power consumption (with wireless on etc.) of at least 12W, so the difference in heat dissipation and battery life is about 3% -- or six minutes in terms of battery life.

DIGITALgimpus wrote:If your doing high IO operations, with things like software compiling, engineering apps, etc... then by all means go with the 7200 RPM drive, you'll make good use of it.

But how much of a diff does IO make in your daily usage? For basic computer use (web, email, office) there's no real difference other than the placebo effect.

Butm then, those uses don't need 160GB, either. You'll need that space for photos and/or multimedia -- which also benefit from a faster disk.

There's talk of 7K200 or something like it from both Hitachi and Seagate by summer'2007.

If you can wait till then, think it'll be worth the wait...



btw, the data density of 5K160 is higher than that of 7K100, so the speed difference may be slightly less than the specs may indicate, especially for large chunks of data read/writes (less random seeks).

What did you decide?

I'm vacillating between the 7k100 and 5k120 for my x31. While the 7k100 is no doubt faster, I'm not sure I'll notice the difference. I currently have a 7k60.

richarddd wrote:What did you decide?

I'm vacillating between the 7k100 and 5k120 for my x31. While the 7k100 is no doubt faster, I'm not sure I'll notice the difference. I currently have a 7k60.

Honestly, nothing yet. Will wait two weeks more and in days before XMAS pick one... think that im slightly more in favour of 7k100 but as I said didn't make any final decision yet.

Is simple. Go for the 7K100 is you intend to do heavy IO operations, play newer games, etc. 5K160 is the way to go if you'll store lots of info. I have a 100GB 7K100 as a primary desk, a 5K60 on the Ultrabay and a E7K100 as a external backup source.

smvp6459 wrote:Some useful comparison data...

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25 ... &chart=144

Look at how small the difference in performance is between the Seagate 100GB 7200rpm drive (47.5) and the Seagate 160GB 5400rpm drive (46.0). And what makes the Samsung 40GB/8M/5400rpm as fast as the Hitachi 7K100?

richarddd wrote:What did you decide?

I got 7K100 today. 100GB is plenty of space on ultraportable notebook IMO, in other hand no matter how big drive may be will be filled up after a while, so instead more *usefull trash* on the drive I opted for better performance. Heck anywone recalls times when certain guy stated "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need".

I have an X32, 1.8ghz, 1.5gb RAM, currently with an older series Hitachi 7200rpm ATA-6, 60gb Hard Drive purchased 2 years ago (and used initially in a T40, later transferred over to the X32, where it has been for a year and a half).

I had ordered a closeout T43 from Lenovo however the deal has fallen through due to shipping delays and I canceled it. Unfortunately, I ordered some additional RAM and a new HD for the T43 to arrive about the same time (the HD and RAM arrived today).

I'm going to RMA the RAM back to Newegg. I'm debating about replacing the older 7200rpm drive with the newer larger one and maybe using the old 7200rpm drive either in the ultrabay of my T42, or in a small USB 2.0 box.

Here are the model numbers:

Old 7200rpm drive: Hitachi HTS 72606M9AT00 (60gb ATA-6)

New 7200rpm drive: Hitachi HTS 721010G9AT00 (100gb ATA-6)

From looking at spec sheets it appears that the newer drive has a bit lower power consumption and may be nominally faster; of course, it is also larger but I'm not sure I really need 100gb in this laptop. On the other hand, by the time I waste another $6 or $7 sending it back to Newegg and maybe have to pay a restocking fee, I might want to just keep it.

Does anyone think there would be a noticeable difference between these 7200 rpm drives in this laptop, an X32? Or will performance be limited by the system bus and other components to the point where it won't make any real difference?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

ken

I posed a question about the efficacy of older and newer series Hitachi 7200rpm notebook drives. Although I didn't get an answer here I did find this interesting article through googling:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/sto ... 7k100.html

The gist of this article as I understand it is that the newer series of PATA Hitachi drives, e.g. HTS 721010G9AT00 in this example, are somewhat better in the power utilization dept. and have somewhat better performance (overall) than the earlier series, including my old HTS 72606M9AT00. In addition there are some situations where some of the 5400rpm drives may be almost as fast as these 7200rpm drives.

Ken Fox wrote:Does anyone think there would be a noticeable difference between these 7200 rpm drives in this laptop, an X32? Or will performance be limited by the system bus and other components to the point where it won't make any real difference?

I previously had the 7K60 in my X31, and now have the 7K100. While the system components don't limit the performance, the performance difference between 7K60 and 7K100 is small enough not to be noticeable without benchmarking.

However, I find that the 7K100 is quieter and essentially vibration-free, and both of those are very much good things. Not to mention that I have some extra disk space!

Interesting information on the 7200rpm drives. I'm debating between the Hitachi 5K100 HTS541080G9AT00(5400rpm 80G) or the 7K100 HTS721080G9AT00(7200rpm 80G). I don't really need bulk storage and I would prefer the 7200rpm drive for the extra $20, but I was wondering about the power consumption and heat, but after checking some of those stats, the 7K100 is looking pretty sweet.

tomh009 wrote:

Ken Fox wrote:Does anyone think there would be a noticeable difference between these 7200 rpm drives in this laptop, an X32? Or will performance be limited by the system bus and other components to the point where it won't make any real difference?

I previously had the 7K60 in my X31, and now have the 7K100. While the system components don't limit the performance, the performance difference between 7K60 and 7K100 is small enough not to be noticeable without benchmarking.

However, I find that the 7K100 is quieter and essentially vibration-free, and both of those are very much good things. Not to mention that I have some extra disk space!

I posted in another thread difficulties I'm having with getting this 100gb drive (HTS721010G9AT00) to work in my X32. Previously I'd formatted it over a USB 2 adapter with my desktop (512 cluster size) and then loaded a ghost image on it with the drive in my X32. Two attempts resulted in a blinking cursor upper left of screen and nothing else. A Thinkvantage Rescue and Restore similarly failed with the same result on first reboot. I'm now trying to do a native WinXP install and will overwrite that with my ghost or R&R image if the native installation is bootable. All indications from the bios and from WinXP and other installs is that the machine recognizes the drive and there are no unusual problems.

Did you have to do anything special to get this drive to work in your X31, such as flashing firmware, formatting with a specific (or default) cluster size, whatever? I'll know in half an hour whether this fresh WinXP install will work, but if not, short of flashing firmware I'm running out of ideas. The drive may be defective but the fact I've been able to format it and to dump Ghost image files and use R&R and not get any bios errors does not give me the impression the drive is defective.

ken

I did nothing special at all ... it simply worked.

tomh009 wrote:I did nothing special at all ... it simply worked.

I subsequently tried to use the drive in my T42 and had exactly the same problems, but I have now fixed them, or at least think I have. I am going to start another thread because reading through a number of posts I think that my problem is in fact fairly widespread, and another forum member mentioned a solution that turns out to be easy.

ken

I think I remember how I did my upgrade to the 7K100 -- I think borrowed a friend's ultrabay HD adapter, and plugged it into my X31's media base for cloning the drive. Maybe that avoids the issue you are seeing?

tomh009 wrote:I think I remember how I did my upgrade to the 7K100 -- I think borrowed a friend's ultrabay HD adapter, and plugged it into my X31's media base for cloning the drive. Maybe that avoids the issue you are seeing?

No. The reason why I know that this does not avoid that issue is that I tried to use the new drive in my T42 by doing exactly this; putting the new drive in either the main drive area or in the Ultrabay adapter and reimaging the drive from T42 ghost images directly through the T42's bus. I still got a blinking cursor.

I'm not exactly sure what triggers this. In any event, it is easily fixed either with the Thinkpad MBR restoration utility one downloads and uses from a floppy, or with the Windows XP disk. It is probably better to use the IBM utility if you plan to have access to the service partition.

ken

Ken Fox wrote:

tomh009 wrote:I think I remember how I did my upgrade to the 7K100 -- I think borrowed a friend's ultrabay HD adapter, and plugged it into my X31's media base for cloning the drive. Maybe that avoids the issue you are seeing?

No. The reason why I know that this does not avoid that issue is that I tried to use the new drive in my T42 by doing exactly this; putting the new drive in either the main drive area or in the Ultrabay adapter and reimaging the drive from T42 ghost images directly through the T42's bus. I still got a blinking cursor.

I'm not exactly sure what triggers this. In any event, it is easily fixed either with the Thinkpad MBR restoration utility one downloads and uses from a floppy, or with the Windows XP disk. It is probably better to use the IBM utility if you plan to have access to the service partition.

ken

I've always assumed that these problems come down to controller/BIOS idiosyncracies - ie the drive translation logic in one system maps the sectors slightly differently than the one in the Thinkpad.

Once upon a time I thought I'd save time by setting up a removable 2.5" bay in my work Netvista tower, to clone Thinkpad drives. It never worked for that purpose, because apparently the controller/BIOS is different enough for the drive images created that way to never be properly recognized in the Thinkpads I tried.

Where can you download this Thinkpad MBR restoration utility?

Ken Fox wrote:

tomh009 wrote:...it is easily fixed either with the Thinkpad MBR restoration utility one downloads and uses from a floppy, or with the Windows XP disk. It is probably better to use the IBM utility if you plan to have access to the service partition....

w0qj wrote:Where can you download this Thinkpad MBR restoration utility?

I believe this is it:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/y7ct2y

Thanks!

Can you use any enclosure (ata-6) to swap out drives?

Will any of these work? http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... der=PRICED

One of the biggest advantages of having a 5k 160GB is enough space for two primary partitions to have Win XP and Vista in dual boot. My original Windows XP is 21 GBs with system and installed programs. So I made two partitions of 32 GB each for the two OS. The rest of approx 78GB is for my work and media files accessible from both OS.

So if anyone wants to try Vista but dont want to let go XP yet, 160GB drive gives enough space to play around. For this purpose, I would advise to get that till 160GB 7200rpm come to the market (and the price goes a bit down).

chaukap wrote:f anyone wants to try Vista but dont want to let go XP yet, 160GB drive gives enough space to play around. .

No space is enough for Vista - all your space belongs to us.

Admin: would you please shorten/edit long link posted by Spectre.

Running out of space on the 7K100 80Gb in my X31 and pondering my next move. The 7K100 has served me well although 18 months down the road it seems to "hunt" a bit, I wonder if a reformat wouldn't help it, unless it's just worn out from running pretty much non-stop. I take it there are no issues installing a SATA or PATA HD in an X31 ?