Thinkpads Forum

My boss wants to upgrade the hard disk in his X60 from 60gb. Searching around one of the popular mail order sites I notice that 120gb SATA notebook drives are fairly reasonable now (Samsung $115US, HItachi $120, Seagate $150).

The Lenovo sales site lists 100GB as max for the X60. Is this really the case?

Also, any comments on brands? I've heard mixed reviews about Hitachi and Samsung.

I had been using Seagate 120GB/5400RPM SATA (ST9120821AS) in my X60.
Seagate is quieter than Hitachi. and also same good performance.
I recommend a Seagate SATA drive.

I already replaced a 120GB SATA Seagate with new Hitachi SATA 160GB(5400rpm) due to need for more capacity.
It has been working good so far.
This time I could not get a Seagate drive because of no inventory in shop.

SteveGT wrote:My boss wants to upgrade the hard disk in his X60 from 60gb.

What speed disk does he have now? If he has 7200 rpm, dropping to a 5400 rpm disk (even if it's 120 GB) will likely make him rather unhappy. 100 GB 7200 rpm disks are readily available, though.

I have a Hitachi 5K160 in my X60s. Works great.

Once you replaced the harddisk to IBM, will the anti-shock system still be operational? My understanding is that the anti-shock system is in the HDD and not the Thinkpad.

The movement and acceleration sensors are in the Thinkpad, not the drive. So no worries...

I read quite a bit on this before I ordered because what I used to do is get a relatively big HDD and least RAM and dump the RAM and OS because I could get better RAM cheaper and I was going to nuke their install of Windows first thing out of the box. So now that 2.5" HDDs are cheaper I thought I'd look into it. Many places, Tomshardware included, conclude that 5400 rpm is the best overall performance/noise/heat/battery life choice, but capacity and particular specs like noise/heat vary widely btwn models and mfgs. Anyway, there was no compelling reason to get anything other than the 100GB for me because even though I have over half a terabyte of HDD storage in my desktop I can't allow that kind of data bloat on my laptop because there is not way to add a disk conveniently so I thought it better to start being frugal about space by limiting myself a bit.

Anyway my experience with HDDs in general says that the fluid bearing ones with somewhat slower seek times tend to be the quietest and beyond that it's usually wise to read every single independent review you can of the models you're considering before taking the plunge.

So not all of that is in direct response to the main question you asked but my advice is read reviews.

I have had two outright HDD failures in my life in my personal machines (IBM 75GXP, WD 2000 SATA) I can't recommend research enough.

But I guess the moral is, especially with a laptop, have lots of backups in lots of places.

tomh009 wrote:What speed disk does he have now? If he has 7200 rpm, dropping to a 5400 rpm disk (even if it's 120 GB) will likely make him rather unhappy.

That depends on what the notebook is used for. If his boss does video encoding or other hard drive intensive work, the difference in speed is more noticeable than if he only does word processing and surfs the web. In addition, a lower rotation speed can be viewed as an acceptable tradeoff for a significant increase in storage space.

FredFromNYC wrote:

tomh009 wrote:What speed disk does he have now? If he has 7200 rpm, dropping to a 5400 rpm disk (even if it's 120 GB) will likely make him rather unhappy.

That depends on what the notebook is used for. If his boss does video encoding or other hard drive intensive work, the difference in speed is more noticeable than if he only does word processing and surfs the web. In addition, a lower rotation speed can be viewed as an acceptable tradeoff for a significant increase in storage space.

I ended up getting the 100gb drive. It was the "HITACHI Travelstar 5K100 HTS541010G9SA00 (0A26930) 100GB 5400 RPM", which I believe was basically the same drive that came from the factory, only larger capacity. The decision was the bosses', though I suspect that since there were only 3 gb left on the 60 gig drive, he'll be upgrading again before too long

By the way, he uses his X60 for email, excel, and web browsing.

Once I got the disk in, it was a bit of a challenge to clone it from the original drive. I posted my experiences with that in another thread here.