Thinkpads Forum

Hi everyone,

I am thinking of upgrading my factory Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 with the 7K320. Primarily to increase WinXP startup performance.

I have successfully upgraded many thinkpad HDD in the past so am comfortable with the process.

Some questions however:
* Has anyone done this? Is the performance gain noticeable?
* Will the 7K320 drive physically fit inside the T60p? I have read somewhere that some of these higher capacity drives are slightly thicker than 9.5mm
* Are there any other special issues with this upgrade or the 7K320 I should be aware of?

Thanks!!!

zern wrote:Has anyone done this? Is the performance gain noticeable?

There are many forum members successfully done such upgrade. I believe the gain in general performance will be well noticeable. 7K200 rocks, 7K320 should be even better As for increasing windows startup performance in particular, it very much depends on your setup. Clean XP install has quite good startup behavior, but M$ updates simply kill that (and so can do different programs and too much OS tweaking).

zern wrote:Will the 7K320 drive physically fit inside the T60p? I have read somewhere that some of these higher capacity drives are slightly thicker than 9.5mm.

It will fit without any problems.

zern wrote:Are there any other special issues with this upgrade or the 7K320 I should be aware of?

No, not really.

I upgraded my X61s with a 7k320 and it works like a charm. It was slightly harder to get the 7k320 in rather than the standard Seagate that came with the computer, but it fit. Speed wise, there was a difference, but not significant. Everything was a little snappier under XP.

If you need the size, then go for it, otherwise I don't think it was worth the cost, about $60-70 for me. Buy a 32GB SSD and carry an external drive for speed. I'm hoping 64GB SSD will go down in price and be reliable enough soon!

I recently upgraded the HD in my T60p to a Travelstar HTS723225l9A360 (250GB) without a hitch. I Ran the factory restore CD set with the new HD installed, installed Partition Magic to create a second partition for data storage. That allowed me to copy in an image backup of the orignal 100GB Travelstar use it to recreate the C: partition on the new drive. There was no physical issue whatever.

As for startup comparison, I have a T60 for which I used the same process to replace a 100GB Travelstar with a 250GB Western Digital. I found that there seemed to be no noticeable performance change. If I had noticed a change, I would then have tried to measure it, but if I couldn't notice it, I am not interested in specifics.