How About This HD for the T30?

[ronbo613]

I need another hard drive for my PC and I can get this Seagate Momentus ATA-6 drive "free" in a combo deal. Any opinions on how this drive would work in the T30?

[chan_man]

It should work, just move the mounting hardware from your old drive

[tfflivemb2]

If it is free, then go for it.

Personally, I would try to stay away from Seagate drives in Thinkpads, specifically the T30. There have been a few threads about problems getting the T30 to recognize certain Seagate drives....not sure which ones though.

[ronbo613]

Yes, fooling around with this Thinkpad hard drive is a little more involved than I figured. So many variables, so many different issues.
Even if the drive would be free, if it's not going to work, forget it. I like Seagate drives, got plenty of them in my PCs, but I'm losing my enthusiasm for upgrading the T30 hard drive real quick. I have backup drives for all my work computers and this T30 will most likely not have the most comfortable life so I'd like to have a backup drive, but doing nothing and keeping my fingers crossed might be the best way to go.

[tfflivemb2]

You could always get it free as part of a trade, then sell it here to someone that DOESN'T want to use it in a T30, or Thinkpad for that matter.....then buy another drive for yourself

[schleptop]

I use Seagate 3.5 inch drives in my PCs, but I think they tend to get hotter than other drives. I have one 2.5 inch Seagate in an external USB enclosure (Ovation), and it seems to be much more temperamental when connecting to a USB port compared to my Hitachi and Samsung 2.5 inch drives. I freqently get "Delayed Write" errors.

Of course, this might be caused by the enclosure, but my bet would be that it draws more power and that's what causes the problem. As I said, other 2.5 inch drives/enclosures seem to be fine.

[ronbo613]

I have at least six Seagate 3.5" drives for my PCs among a few WDs and Maxtors. Generally, I've had pretty good luck with them all. For SATA drives, I would consider Seagate 7200.10 drives to be the best of the non-enterprise desktop drives. For smaller IDE drives around 80-120G, I prefer Western Digital Caviar drives. Being in the video and photo editing business, I use a lot of drives. I probably buy at least one 300G+ drive every 2-3 months for one of the computers or external enclosures.
Back to the Segate Momentus laptop drive. I contacted Seagate about the compatibility with the T30 and I got the standard response that aside from official IBM drives, there is no guarantee that the drive will work. Maybe I'll ask them if they have a "loaner" drive I can check out!
This whole upgrading the T30 hard drive deal has reminded me why I build my own computers and left the world of proprietary hardware behind.

[tfflivemb2]

Don't get me wrong, Seagate makes good drives....I use them in PCs, but they might be too advanced or have something proprietary in them that causes problems with the Thinkpad.

[ronbo613]

I hear you. I'm not a brand name fanboy by any means. Whatever does the job is what I want.
Not going to buy an IBM drive, that's for sure, so kind of at a dead end. Somebody should compile a list of which hard drives work with specific laptops.