Thinkpads Forum

I see the 100g 7200 RPM hard drive is listed as an option now on Lenovo's site. Is it worth the extra money? Does it affect battery life of the X60s? And lastly, does it increase heat issues?

I haven't noticed significant power time losses...I have the 100GB 7200rpm from Hitachi and I'm getting the same times for the batteries. You can eek out a little extra time, reduce heat, and reduce noise if you change the S.M.A.R.T. drive settings (which you can do in Notebook Hardware Control from inside XP). When I'm on AC and need the speed, I run it at full speed.

I'd recommend getting the drive from someone besides Lenovo...I bought mine for $184 and I didn't even buy it from the cheapest seller. Installation is a piece of cake and then you have a spare drive; you'll just have find a way to install things on the new drive (you can do it with Ghost or you could probably buy the media from Lenovo).

Hmm... I think I would prefer not to go through the hassle of getting my own drive. So you think it's worth the extra money though?

Generally, I'd say that the biggest bottleneck on any new laptop is the harddrive. If you can speed up the harddrive you can make the bottleneck a little bit larger. I just plain hate lag time and do whatever I can to minimize it...it was worth $180 to get a bigger, faster drive than the stock drive that came with my model. If decreasing boot time by a handful of seconds and reducing program load time by milliseconds is worth it to you then I would recommend buying a faster drive. You'll see a difference if you compare 5400rpm to 7200rpm.

Wolfie wrote:Hmm... I think I would prefer not to go through the hassle of getting my own drive. So you think it's worth the extra money though?

This is both a time and money issue. I did this upgrade for one of my friends with the identical computer to mine. Result: rather disappointing. Yes it is a bit faster upon bootup and loading apps, however on a day to day basis, it's just not that noticeable. Especially since we find the 5400 rpm drive a pretty fast drive as it is (compared to 5400 drives in other brands).

I was considering "upgrading to 7200" for mine until I did his computer. For me the tradeoffs are not worth it. With the faster drive we noticed some heat, some vibration and not enough overall performance gains to make it worthwhile. If one absolutely has to have the "fastest" and money and time are no object then it's something to consider. Also take into consideration that unless you are running some pretty demanding software, you will probably be wasting your time and money.

Hmm... I read in another thread that while there were increased vibrations it wasn't very noticeable. Also, are there differences in cache between the different hard drive sizes?

Wolfie wrote:Hmm... I read in another thread that while there were increased vibrations it wasn't very noticeable. Also, are there differences in cache between the different hard drive sizes?

In my earlier post I mentioned "some" vibration. For clarification I was reporting some vibration as it's noticeable, but not (for me) a problem or objectionable. There are some people who might find it unacceptable. I find that there are many people on this forum (like myself... ) that are very discerning and sensitive to the slightest amount of vibration/heat/noise/ etc.

So in this particular case, the original 5400 rpm drive was completely silent, cool and undetectable as far as vibration is concerned. The 7200 drive could be heard, was warm, and a bit of vibration could be noticed. The result is either acceptable or not, soley based on personal opinion. Either way I find it's a fantastic computer.

Also remember that small vibration problems can probably be tweaked with a good SMART utility -- it may sacrifice the performance you were looking for in a 7200 though :-/

A few months ago ,I measured a battery operation time difference between Seagate 5400rpm(120GB) and Seagate 7200rpm(100GB).
It showed 7200rpm decreased the time 10% than 5400rpm, but performance improved within 10% in my case.
Generally 7200rpm harddrive is a bit noisy ,but Seagate is quiet.
I recommend 5400rpm harddrive for usual use for X60/s.