Advice for a new HDD?

[Cedric]

Hi,

System: T42 UC2M1GE, Hitachi 80 GB (HTS541080G9AT00), Win XP Prof. SP2

After one and a half year of very good working I've recognized corrupted sectors of the HDD. Now it's time to look for a new HDD. The new HDD should be a good compromise between performance and noice. The price is nearly irrelevant. Any advices?

Thanks in advance.

[agarza]

Your best bet is the 7K100, is a little noisy, but if you set the drive parameters to silent it wouldn't almost emit sound. Max Capac is 100GB

The 5K160 from Hitachi is another option, but spinning @ 5400rpm.
Next year first Qtr there will be a launch of the hybrid drives, incorporating usually a portion of HDD space in Flash format, supposedly to help battery life in laptops using power eater: Windows Vista.

[pianowizard]

After one and a half year of very good working I've recognized corrupted sectors of the HDD.

Only 1.5 years? That's too bad. Is it still under warranty?

[lpenner]

I don't intend to hijack this thread.

I installed a 60 GB Hitachi 7K and am quite pleased with it. That said, benottomex, I'm interested in your comment about setting parameters to silent.

How,where do I do that?

[smaug7]

Hey guys, I was thinking about upgrading my HDD also. I have the t41 2379-DJU and was looking at this HDD from newegg
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822149030
do you guys know if this HDD will work?
and also, if you get a new HDD, how do you install the recovery partition that was included in the original HDD? Thanks

[PanEuropean]

I recently purchased two Seagage 160 GB drives for my T42p - one for the primary bay, and another for the slide-in holder that fits in the large slot (Ultrabay Slim) on the side of the computer.

These have worked very well, they are quiet and fast. Below I have listed the 'official' name of the drive, as well as a link to the product page at the supplier that I bought the drive from. The supplier is neither here nor there, I'm just providing the link because it describes the drives.

Seagate Momentus 5400.3 ST9160821A - Hard drive - 160 GB - internal - 2.5" - ATA-100 - 44 pin IDC - 5400 rpm - buffer: 8 MB

http://www.insight.ca/apps/productprese ... 00%2520rpm

[Lazarus]

I have nothing bad sad, bad stories to tell about those Seagate 160GB drives.
Both SATA & ATA.
After just a few weeks in service all my Seagate drives came back with surface errors.

I strongly recommended the Hitachi 160GB drives.
They are faster(!) and much more reliable.

[PanEuropean]

How does one determine if a drive has a 'surface error'? Is there some kind of utility that can be used to do this, or does the drive need to be removed and sent out for analysis?

[Eddie]

My 2-cents worth:

Whatever you do, don’t even consider it if its not a 7200 rpm drive. The difference in performance between 7200 and 5400 is unbelievable.

If your existing drive is 7200 rpm, switching to 5400 would be intolerable. If you’re currently at 5400 … well if you’re going to spend money for an upgrade anyway, you’d be wasting your money if you don’t upgrade the speed at the same time ... Its available, the price isn’t that much different, and the difference in performance is huge.

[PanEuropean]

Hi Eddie:

Keep in mind that it can sometimes be difficult to find really large 7,200 RPM drives. My highest priority is storage space - I have two 160 gb drives installed, one in the main drive holder and one in the UltraBay. I couldn't find any 7,200 RPM drives in the 160 gb size. I work mostly with photos, and the computer is 'fast enough'.

I'm not denying that a 7,200 RPM drive would be preferable over a 5,400, all other things being equal, but the problem is that all other things usually are not equal.

[koden]

I need storage....is 160 GB the biggest HD to find???

[schmaud]

Hi,

there are articles about 200GB drives, but the biggest I have seen on sale is 160.

For the debate 5400 vs 7200:
consider going for a larger capacity: this means higher data density, theerfore more data read per rotation. I do not have numbers, but I could imagine that a 120 GB 5400 is not at all slower than a 60GB 7200...

E.g. the 120 GB from samsung is way faster than the 100GB from the same series.

Is there anything bigger than 100GB with 7200?

thanks

ralf

PS: for the original post:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... -5400.html

and related articles there might be usefull.

[Lazarus]

How does one determine if a drive has a 'surface error'? Is there some kind of utility that can be used to do this, or does the drive need to be removed and sent out for analysis?

You activate S.M.A.R.T. and then check the logs.
It will also give you a statistical estimate about the drive's remaining live span.

[Lazarus]

My 2-cents worth:

Whatever you do, don’t even consider it if its not a 7200 rpm drive. The difference in performance between 7200 and 5400 is unbelievable.

That is just plain wrong.
If you work e.g. mostly in MS Office I gan guarentee you that you wouldn't even notice the difference if you had a 4800RPM drive in your system.
If you access mostly large files in read write or smaller files in only read mode, than cache is much more important than RPMs (up to a certain degree).
Test results bear that one put.
If you access many small files in write mode often or large DB files in mega & giga byte size than RPMs matter above all else.

Naturally you also have to put buss & controller speed into the equasion (bottleneneck effect).

You can not simplify this issue that way.
Its like saying - always drive a Ferrari since its the fastest car out there.
And then you get into a dirt road race with a Jeep 4x4.
And guess what, you'll lose.

[Lazarus]

Hi,
...Is there anything bigger than 100GB with 7200?...

Right now the 2.5" disks with 7200RPM top out at 100-120GB.

[Eddie]

You’re absolutely right Lazarus,

If all you’re doing is typing in Word, you won’t notice the difference in performance with a fast drive. Of course, you wouldn’t notice if your CPU was running at 100 Mhz either; Because all the computer needs to do when you’re typing, is process keystrokes. As long as it can keep up with a human, its golden.

You very rarely see the value of a pimped-out system at the application level. Games maybe, intense graphics applications perhaps … but the real performance difference is realized at the OS. Sure, cache helps a lot, because it quickens the I/O. Memory helps even more, because it reduces the amount of I/O you have to do. But when you do wait, you’re almost always waiting on I/O; And the only time when performance is noticeable, is when you’re waiting. If its the internet that’s slow, then you’re waiting on network I/O, so increase your bandwidth. Otherwise, its almost always disk.

Bottom line, is that with the exception of very few compute-intensive applications, performance depends on fast I/O; Its way more important than CPU speed. As I conceded above, there are other ways to reduce I/O wait, and if you can honestly say that you never wait for a window to load; if you’re satisfied with how long your system takes to boot; In short, if you’re never actually waiting on your computer to do something, then you’re right; there’s no room for improvement. But if you do wait, under whatever circumstance that occurs, that wait time could, in most cases, be reduced with a faster disk.

That said, Schmaud has a good point; RPMs is not the only way to make a disk faster. As noted, cache improves performance dramatically. And as Schmaud points out, packing density matters a lot as well. In a laptop, it generally equates that a 120GB drive really will deliver twice as many bytes per revolution as a 60GB drive and that’s like having a drive moving at twice the speed. However, a 120GB harddrive at 5400 RPM is only 20% “faster” than a 100GB drive at 5400 RPM, whereas a 100GB drive at 7200 RPM will be 33% faster. And a 120GB drive at 7200 RPM will be 60% faster. So the solution to the performance issue is to go as fast as possible at the largest capacity. Oh, and don’t kill yourself about cache; Having some, matters a lot, but having a lot only matters some.

One more note: The equation of harddrive capacity to packing density is not absolute. You see quantum leaps in drive capacities when there are technological improvements to increase packing densities. However, within a certain state of technology, the difference in drive capacities is usually due to the number of platters. In this case, the packing density IS NOT increased, and the speed IS NOT improved by increasing the capacity. You usually don't see this though with laptop drives, because of the size limitations.

[JHaislet]

Go for the Hitachi 7K100 100GB 7200RPM IDE 2.5" drive.
I just upgraded my T43 from a 80GB 5400RPM 5K100 Hitachi to it's 7200RPM 100GB brother and the difference is great. Windows loads much faster and the lag is greatly reduced when multi-tasking and working with large files (e.g. burning a DVD and still being able to use your laptop).

[ashleys]

Yep, I'd recommend the Hitachi 100GB 7200RPM.

When I first made the jump from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM my boot time reduced significantly. The boot process, what with heavy I/O load, poor locality of reference (even with well defragged disk) and some relatively small block size requests certainly benefits from the improved latency etc. of the 7200 RPM's.

Normal mundane processing is unaffected as stated by other posts.

[koden]

okay... it seems that 7200 is bether. But how big can I get 7200 drives?

[Eddie]

Koden; Its not for me to challenge why you need so much space … If you do, you do. I know of no really huge drives for laptops, and nothing over 100GB at 7200RPM. If you must sacrifice speed for size, then you must. But even so, you may have a hard time finding the capacity you say you need.

For most people, 100GB is more than enough for a laptop. Not that there isn't need for more capacity in modern computing, but the point of a laptop, for most people at least, is to take their ability on the road; Normally, one does not need 100% of everything they do, to go with them. If you also have a desktop computer, most of the really big stuff would normally be on that system. If you use your laptop as your desktop (which I think is the way to go!) then use a docking station and add extra drives there, arranging your data so that the subset of stuff you need when you go on-the-road, is on the internal drive.

I myself have an old T20, which I've had for 7-years, and I just can't ask for anything more; Its equipped with a 60GB 7200RPM Hitachi drive, and instead of a docking station, I use a simple port replicator to attach my monitor, full size keyboard, and mouse. For extra storage, I mount network drives shared-out from an old Pentium-II system running Windows-98, which I leave running in the basement. I call it my "home server", and it holds about 850GB of family-shared storage. The fact that I can only take 60GB with me on the road, has NEVER been a problem; And I run a full software development environment on it, plus two full-blown Enterprise Server software platforms to demo to my customers, including an Oracle database. And with all of this, I still have space to carry about 25GB of MP3 files.

Perhaps a similar solution would be possible for you.

For Cedric, who started this thread (and whom we haven't heard from since), I second the recommendation of the Hitachi 7K100 100GB 7200RPM IDE 2.5" drive. It's simply the best option regardless of your situation. Its affordable, fast, high capacity, and reliable. Also, Hitachi would be my first choice for brand name in any case, since they are the actual manufacturer for IBM branded laptop drives, and were the first manufacturer of 7200 RPM laptop drives. These drives have a very good track record, and today Hitachi is the only manufacturer with a second generation of 7200 RPM products for laptops. My choice, hands-down.

-Eddie