Question Concerning A New HDD for My T21

[mayidunk]

Hi All,

I am considering replacing the existing 20Gb HDD on my T21 with a Hitachi 7K60. I've tried researching if this is a direct replacement for the primary HDD for the T21, but am not satisfied by what I have seen so far, as there seems to be no real direct information as to this particular drive's suitability. Perhaps I'm looking in all the wrong places? Perhaps one of you have installed one of these in a T21 and can tell me straight up if it'll work or not.

Thanks,
Bob

[JonathanW]

Bob, it really is simple - it'll fit and work well!! It would be far more difficult to find a drive that doesn't fit to be honest ...

As for the 7K60 itself, personally I find it a little noisy - there is a distinct 'whooshing' which after a 4200 drive is distracting if you are concerned with silent computing, which I am. I have the 7K60 in my Audio workstation but settled for the 5K80 drives for my day to day machines which in my opinion perform almost as well as the 7K60 but with less noise.

But don't hold back any longer, buy, fit (in 60 seconds) and enjoy!

Jonathan

[verktyg]

I was ready to buy a new TP to replace my T20. I installed a 7K60 instead. The speed increase was like a 200MHz CPU upgrade!

I found the 7K60 to be very quiet. It's important to make sure that the HDD caddy contacts the bottom of the HDD. The plastic film doesn't seem like much but it helps keep noise down.

Later I swapped the 7K60 over to my new X31 and it cut boot up time in half!

[mayidunk]

I appreciate your help in this matter. I believe an upgrade is around the corner...

Thanks, guys!

[mayidunk]

Just to bring this to a close, I ended up getting the Seagate Momentus 100gig, 5400RPM drive. I thought long and hard about the Hitachi 60gig, 7200RPM drive, but decided in the end that I wanted more space so that I could play around with dual booting into linux.

A question... Though I've been reading how people were very impressed with the speed-up of their machines after installing the Hitachi drive, I had read someplace that the additional speed of the drive was lost on the T21 as the bottleneck for that machine is the drive interface, and not the drive. Any thoughts on this? Has anyone here found this to be true for themselves?

After reading up on other forums and websites, I decided that the Hitachi drive probably would have made my T21 respond a bit snappier, but opted for the extra space instead, as the difference in speed and battery life between the two drives seemed negligable in light of the extra space gained by using the Seagate drive.

Bob