HDD Upgrade Investigation

[mj-barton]

Hello all to the Thinkpad Community,

I referenced this place before but first time poster.

I've run out of space on my existing harddrive and looking to upgrade. My T42p running Vista Business. I want to upgrade to something substantially larger. As of right now I'm looking at purchasing a HITACHI Travelstar 7K200. Specs are here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822145160

I've done hdd upgrades for desktop boxes but never a laptop. What compatibility issues should I be aware of? Nothing has been decided yet so I'm open to suggests and thoughts.

[GomJabbar]

You just need a PATA 2.5" standard-size laptop drive. No SATA drive.

[mj-barton]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Good point to make sure it's a PATA drive not a SATA.
I'd like to open the door for suggestions.

I'm in the market for:
2.5"
Preferably 7200rpm
> 160 gig (somewhere 200 gig)
PATA

Also known to be hassle free with Thinkpad T4x series.

Any suggestions??
Also, is there a significant performance drop going from 7200rpm to 5400rpm. It looks as though 5400rpm genre provides quite a few more options.

[richk]

Hitachi is the brand that I vote to be "most likely to be compatible". About a year ago, I did a test of boot times with 4200, 5400 and 7200 RPM drives and found that there was a direct relationship. The time went down in proportion to the speed. Booting is the type of process where the RPM is most important. You are reading lots of little files, so faster rotation means less time waiting for the disk to spin to the right place. I tried to test big files, and got inconclusive results. There, you are limited by transder rate, which is related to bus speed, the amount of memory (secondary cache), disk fragmentation and other unknown factors. (at least, unknown by me)

[Johan]

Also, is there a significant performance drop going from 7200rpm to 5400rpm. It looks as though 5400rpm genre provides quite a few more options.

I suggest you take a look in this thread and see the post of Fri Jul 20, 2007 - follow those links and see where they will take you. If you do that, you'll find comparison of 7200 rpm vs. 5400 rpm drives (as you will understand, this is a very common topic, so no need to repeat here what has already been said elsewhere on the forum).

Best regards,

Johan

[mj-barton]

Thanks for the replies.

Life has been busy so I haven't had much of a chance to get back to this thread. Anyway, it is Sunday and killing some time on the laptop. Anyway, I've done some digging on the suggested links.

Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB (ST9160821A)

I think I'm going to "down grade" to a 5400rpm drive so that I can maximize space. Also I like the sizable 5 year warranty to back up this investment. I probably won't proceed with actual upgrade until for about 3 weeks.

Has anybody used this drive? Should I be concerned at all? It sounds like Seagate is a quality band.

[Brad]

I have used this drive in my A22p. It appeared that I didn't lose too much speed from the 7K60 that I upgraded from. I also tried the Hitachi 5K160 with similar results.

The Seagate 5 year warranty is very compelling.

Brad

[mj-barton]

LAST CALL...

I'd like to get a confirmation from the Thinkpad Users that this drive will be compatible with my T42p.

Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB (ST9160821A)

I'd like to order it this coming Monday.

[Johan]

According to the thread Upgraded HD in T42 -- hd chatter it should work in a T42/p. Also check 160GB Drive for my t42 2373 and Advice for a new HDD? - all will answer your question.

The Search function in this forum actually works quite well - you could try it some day!

Best regards,

Johan