Hard Drive Speeds

[fwebb]

Have owned 3 600series, 1 A21M. Looking for another TP. Is there a guide somewhere to determine the speed of the hard drive? Want 5400 or 7200.

[jdhurst]

Pick the drive you want and look at the specs to determine the speed. But assuming you are replacing the drive anyway, a 7200 rpm drive strikes me as best. The Hitachi 7K60 Travelstar works wonderfully well in my T41 but I don't know how well it will work in your A21M (if at all). Others may have the answer you seek. ... JD Hurst

[fwebb]

Thanks. Looking for a newer used TP that already has 5400 or 7200 installed. No more 4200s.

[verktyg]

A 5400 or 7200 RPM HDD with a 2MB cache isn't going to show as much increase in performance as one of these faster drives with 8, 12 or 16MB of cache (buffer or memory built into the drive that speeds up data acquisition).

My X31 came with a 40G 5400 RPM HDD with 2MB of cache. This TP wasn't a whole lot faster than my PIII 500 240X or PIII 650, 256MB T20. I have fast drives with 8MB cache in both of these older TPs.

I replaced the factory X31 5400 RPM 2MB cache HDD with a Hitachi 7K60 Travelstar that has 8MB of cache. I Ghosted the original drive image to the new drive, nothing else changed.

Boot time was cut in half and the X31 started acting like a 1.6G system with 1g of memory.