Thinkpads Forum

Hi Gents,

I have a t60 and want to upgrade the hdd to 320gb or 500gb. Currently have a 80GB 5400rpm multibooting Ubuntu, XP, Vista.

On the new hdd id set it up multibooting all of the above operating systems plus Win7.

I’ve read the forum posts here and on toms hardware and the shortlist:


Hitachi Travelstar 7k320 320GB

or

Seagate ST9320423AS Momentus 7200.3 or .4 in 320GB.


Id like it to be fast and quite... I know demand the impossible and pushing the boundaries! Can anyone recommend which one I should go for? Or even recommend a better hdd.

Many thanks,

Techfish

techfish wrote:Id like it to be fast and quite

Get a SSD, though that probably won't be much of a space upgrades. As for the drives, I've had good luck with Seagate of late and a Seagate drive gets you a free download of DiscWizard from Seagate. It's a limited version of True Image, a very good imaging tool. Performance wise there probably all about the same in real world usage. Whether it's noisy or not is probably more related to luck than anything else. That's what the warranty is for. Good Luck.

cheers, the ssd is pricey.

The Hitachi Travelstar 7k320 comes in two interfaces 1.5 and 3 Gb/s, The 7k500 and seagate momentus 7200.4 are 3 Gb/s interface. As the t60 hardware is limited to 1.5. Will I get any problems with installing the 7k500 or seagate drive. Will the t60 simply cap the 3Gb/s drives at 1.5 and all should recognise ok

Don't worry about the HD SATA speed, all those HDs will work in your T60, albeit throttled down to ~1.5.
Get the highest speed you can afford. If you later change to a faster laptop, you can take the HD with you.

cheers mate,

Shopping around for prices and nobody in the UK has the 7k500 in stock...

You may also have trouble finding the 7K320 Hitachi drives.

My impression is that they stopped making them about the time that the 7K500 family was announced for November 2009 shipping.

I am just beginning to se the 7K500 drives in various sizes here in the U.S. but the bulk disk encryption version is still not available.

I have a 7k500 in my thinkpad and love it. Very fast and silent. They aren't easy to find, but worth the effort.

And I think the above poster means the 20500 series as 7k500 means 7200 rpm and 500 GB.

On-line UK retailers have listed them but nobody has a firm in stock date...

whats the hold up Hitachi?

They always seem to be in short supply, I have no idea why. I was lucky and got 3 of them for $84 a few weeks ago. Just sold the last one on Ebay last week.

cheers, Span.com have it on sale for £98 w/o pp in the UK. Hoping more online retailers will have it in stock next week.

The 7K500 500GB Hitachi drive can be bought from MicroCenter for about $90 at this time.

www.microcenter.com

The Minnesota store had about 90 in stock.

There were two kinds of packages on hand. One referred to 4th generation and the newer didn't talk about generations at all, but, as far as I know, there has only been one 7K Hitachi Travelstar with 500GB.

blgaarder wrote:The 7K500 500GB Hitachi drive can be bought from MicroCenter for about $90 at this time.

http://www.microcenter.com

The Minnesota store had about 90 in stock.

There were two kinds of packages on hand. One referred to 4th generation and the newer didn't talk about generations at all, but, as far as I know, there has only been one 7K Hitachi Travelstar with 500GB.

Is it this one here?

http://www.microcenter.com/search/searc ... &category=

It's the second down on that page:

Hitachi - Global Storage Technologies Travelstar 500GB 2.5" 7,200 RPM Internal Hard Drive Kit
Original Price: $95.99

Our Price: $89.99
You Save: $6.00
SKU: 497990
Mfr Part #: HD20500 IDK/7K
UPC: 705487180855

Is that the one? *Expletive*, I was just in their neighborhood a couple days after this post. Will be down there in Milpitas probably in a few weeks. They have a store in Mountain View, just a little ways away. Will maybe pick one up to replace the 60GB 5400 in my T60.

blgaarder wrote:... as far as I know, there has only been one 7K Hitachi Travelstar with 500GB.

There are three; standard, bulk data encryption and enhanced availability or "HTE.." versions.

I used a 7K60 60GB EA version in my T42p for a few years and worked fine. They are designed to be powered on 24/7 such as small servers.

My wife doesn't keep much files on her computer, most are on USB HDD or our NAS. I bought a Seagate 7200.4 250GB for her new (for us) T60 from Newegg. This is a single platter version of the 500GB. So should be just as fast.

If storage requirement is not large, this drive and the Hitachi 7K500 250GB are single platter designs with similar areal density.

I don't know why WD Scorpio Black gets such a bad "vibration" rap these days. I have a wd2500BEKT - 250gb 7200, it is totally quiet and not very hot. It is not single platter either ( So the difference with my old IDE WD2500BEVE is not very big.

Yes, WD doesn't have a 250GB single platter drive or a 500GB double platter yet. Largest is 160GB/320GB. So best performance at the moment are Seagate and Hitachi.

Here is a reasonable fast 32GB SLC SSD.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0410474164
I have quite a few of the 1.8 inch PATA version in use in my X40/X41. Very happy with the performance.

I got my wife's T60 running, on Windows 7. I bought two drives for it, a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 250GB and a Sandisk SLC SSD 32GB. In the end I used the Momentus since the installation was more than 40GB. I did get some benchmark data from these two drives.

Along are factory option and current drive performance from my work T60:
Hitachi 5K160 80GB (FRU 39T2705)
Hitachi 7K200 200GB

Both the Hitachi drives are 2 platter design and the single platter capacity then would be 40GB/100GB. Comparing to the signle platter Momentus 7200.4, the 80GB is just about 1/5 of the speed; pretty close to the areal density difference. The Hitachi 7K500 should have similar performance to the Momentus 7200.4. For small file size, the SSD wins out as it has very little seek latency.