Thinkpads Forum

I put a 7200rpm, 100GB drive in my T60, replacing the 60GB 5400 rpm drive. Both are Lenovo drives made by Hitachi. The new drive makes much more noise when the drive is accessed than the slower drive.

Is this normal or a bad drive?
Thanks

Normal.

Hitachi drives are known to be loud and hot. They were the first 2.5" 7200 drives on the market, however.

Seagate makes 7200rpm notebook drives now and they are known to be cooler and quieter (for all their hdds)...but as you state, Lenovo uses the HGST drives instead.

I installed a HGST 80GB 7200rpm drive into my Dell Lat D600 last year and noticed that the left palm rest gets VERY hot when I'm using the disk a lot. I also noticed the significant db increase.

Normal.

Different drives have different characteristics - sound being one. A faster drive will probably sound louder than a slower one too.

Thanks,
Would I have been better off with a Seagate drive?

In my opinion, no. HGST is the "Lenovo" of HDDs. In other words, the HDD technology you bought is IBM Travelstar. So you bought the best IMO...

The Seagate's are more expensive and not an original OEM part for very many manufacturer's that I'm aware of. If you are someone who is anal about noise, then you might want to anti up and take a chance. Seagate's are good drives but for me (working in a lab with 1 billion fans all around me) not worth the price.

Not to mention...I've never had a Deskstar or Travelstar drive fail on me...ever!

Thanks, the Seagate drives are actually about half of the cost of the Lenovo branded one. Your comment about reliability, however, is steering me towards just keeping the loud one.

I upgraded a T42 to the 100GB Hitachi drive and it was also noisy until I ran Hitachi's Feature Tool and turn on Acoustic Managment. After that, it was almost totally silent.

I used HDTach to benchmark the drive's performance before and after the test, and got the exact same results both ways.

Go to this page, download Feature Tool, and set the Acoustic Management setting to Maximum

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Note - I would not change any other setting unless you know exactly what you're doing!

Pardon my ignorance, but I can't even figure out how to download the tool!

You guys really think the Hitachi drives are that loud?

Ive got one of the original 60GB 7k60's, and while i can hear it with the room completly quiet, its really not that load at all... sure, i can hear the seeks sometimes, but its not all that bad...

Here is another thread going on the subject in the Z-Series forum.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=21502

baehrlich wrote:Thanks, the Seagate drives are actually about half of the cost of the Lenovo branded one. Your comment about reliability, however, is steering me towards just keeping the loud one.

I think you are seeing a Lenovo mark up there. When I was shopping drives late last year, there was a significant difference on several hardware sites (newegg.com, tigerdirect.com). However, checking those sites now, it seems that the Seagates have come down in price some. The HGST and Seagates are about the same from what I see on Newegg now...

And thanks to Ron for the HGST utility link!

jeremivw wrote:In my opinion, no. HGST is the "Lenovo" of HDDs. In other words, the HDD technology you bought is IBM Travelstar. So you bought the best IMO...

I did a lot of research on hard drives a few months ago, to replace drives both in my desktop and current laptop. I read a lot of different forums and comments about hard drives.

Although, of course, people have differing (and strong) opinions, I found that IT people favored Seagate drives more than other drives, when it comes to failure rates. IT people are of course people who deal with a lot of drives, because they're servicing whole organizations.

On top of that, Seagate offers a 5 year warranty on their drives. No one else does that (3 years is the best from anyone else). These two things convinced me that the Seagates probably are the most reliable drives. (Although of course my survey was unscientific.)

Seagates are also definitely quieter (this comes out in every review) and out-perfrom the Hitachi's in some categories. Although in general the Hitachi 7200rpm 100Gb drive is definitey the fastest (but only by about 10%). (Seagate, by the way, now makes a 160Gb 5400 rpm drive that's pretty fast--data density effects speed as well as rpm. It's the largest 2.5" drive currently availabe.)

I ordered a T60 that comes with a 5400rpm Hitachi drive. I plan to replace that drive with a 7200rpm Seagate drive and use the Hitachi for backup and dual booting in the UltraBay adapter.

Is this the Seagate one to use?
Model ST910021AS
Thanks