Thinkpads Forum

Hello Everyone -

I've just got my new T520 with DOS (Operating system) and 320 GB 7200 rpm hard drive.

My T520 basically has nothing in it. I plan to install Win7, upgrade RAM, and all the drivers, to make the machine operable this weekend.

I had purchased the Hitachi Travelstar SATA 500GB 7200 rpm drive last year. The model no is : HD205000 IDK/7K.

My plan was to replace the stock 320GB with the 500 GB Hitachi in the T520. And then use the 320 GB in my older T500 machine. (The part number for the 320 GB hard drive that the T520 came with is: 0A68552 - SBB 320GB HDD7200RPM)

Do you think it's advisable to switch to the Hitachi 500Gb drive immediately on the T520:

- Will the Hitachi drive be better than the stock 320GB Thinkpad T520 drive, considering the Hitachi is more than a year old? Is Lenovo using a newer technology of hard drives on the recent thinkpads?

- What about reliability, quality etc? Are the stock Thinkpad drives MORE reliable than an external retail drive bought from the market? I was a little scared after reading some Amazon reviews of Hitachi TravelStar dying in a few months.

I would love the extra 180 of storage on my Thinkpad, so I am hoping if someone can throw some light on whether it's a good idea to use Retail HDDs as primary drives on Thinkpads, from the reliability/quality perspective?
Any opinions are much appreciated!

Better performance wise? I doubt you'd notice much of a difference. The basics of hard drives haven't changed in quite some time.

Reliability comes down to dumb luck more than anything else in my experience. Worst case is the drive fails and it's replaced under warranty. That points out it's always good to have a good backup.

FredGarvin wrote:Better performance wise? I doubt you'd notice much of a difference. The basics of hard drives haven't changed in quite some time.

Reliability comes down to dumb luck more than anything else in my experience. Worst case is the drive fails and it's replaced under warranty. That points out it's always good to have a good backup.

Thanks for the quick reply. I noticed that the Lenovo drive is SATA II, where as the Hitachi one probably isn't. Still I am assuming that the Hitachi drive will "not" be significantly worse than the newer Lenovo drive, in real life performance.

Anyway, in all likelihood I will go ahead with the HITACHI as the primary drive given the extra 180 Gb.

Hopefully someone else can chime in also who have first hand experience with retail HDDs.

I suggest you get a 500GB Momentus XT SSD Hybrid When you have the drivers set up correctly the machine flies.

makaveli559m wrote:I suggest you get a 500GB Momentus XT SSD Hybrid When you have the drivers set up correctly the machine flies.

According to the net, they have high failure rates...

Out of curiosity, was your stock drive a Western Digital Scorpio Black? That's what mine is...I was surprised to get such a nice drive as the baseline option...

(To check, right-click on the drive in "My Computer", go to Properties-->Hardware and look at the label...if it's WD3200BEKT[...] then it's a Scorpio Black)