T42 hard drive PATA or SATA

[awake724]

I've got a T42 2378-FZU with a 40gb hd which I want to upgrade.

The info on this site is great! However I'm little confused on which drive I need - PATA or SATA? I'm guessing it's PATA, and if so, how do you recognize a drive is PATA easily?

I'm looking at the Hitach 5k120 120gb drive - will this work?

I'm guessing ATA-100 means PATA...am I right? Someone please help, and any thoughts on this drive would be appreciated!

Thanks

[agarza]

Yes, indeed ATA-100 means the old technology called PATA. You can either decide to get a HDD with massive space with relatively medium performance or get Hitachi's fastest HDD at the moment (7K100). Later this year will be released the 7K200 with the same performance maxing at 200GB HDD's.

So, in conclusion, any ATA-100 HDD will work on your machine, also you don't have the restriction on installing non IBM-firmware HDD drives (like T43 series suffers: 2080 error)

Welcome to thinkpads.com forum!

[Johan]

... you may also choose Seagate's 2.5" ATA drives of the Momentus 5400.2, 5400.3 or 7200.1 series; these families all comes with an outstanding 5-year warranty (see http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/produc ... /momentus/). The Momentus 7200.2 is just on the horizon; I don't know when they will be available, and I don't know how/where they will distinguish from the 7200.1.

It is generally agreed that a 7200 rpm drive will make a ThinkPad somewhat faster compared to a 5400 drive, but the 7200 rpm drives on the other hand tend to be slightly noisier. Moreover, a 7200 rpm drive comsume somewhat more power compared to a 5400 drive (--> shorter battery time). If you mostly type or surf, and don't need super-blazing HDD speed, I'd recommend a 5400 rpm drive. Boot time will be slightly slower than with a 7200 rpm drive, but... it's your choice what you prefer the most; no noise or a little more speed!

If you're sensitive to HDD noise (which I am!), you'll find several reviews particularly concerned with noise at http://www.silentpcreview.com/ - many other ("mainstream") tests doesn't consider this issue as thorough as at the SilentPC Review site.

The StorageReview site also contains many good reviews on other low-noise 2.5" HDD's, see e.g. http://www.storagereview.com/articles/2 ... 1AS_1.html (note that they deal with a Seagate Momentus 7200.1 SATA-drive, but I would "guess" that the ATA-100 drive would perform very similarly, in terms of noise). The same drive is also investigated at http://www.silentpcreview.com/article278-page1.html . One "close competitor", the Hitachi TravelStar E7K100 7200 rpm notebook drive, is described at http://www.silentpcreview.com/article297-page1.html .

Beware that Hitachi drives contains a feature called "AAM"; Automatic Acoustic Management which enables you to trade speed- against noise-performance (I have never tried AAM, so I don't know how well it works). I would suggest you search forum.thinkpads for the term "AAM", and read the few threads found... much useful information there about 5400 vs. 7200 rpm drives, and about Seagate vs. Hitachi etc. etc.

A final, small hint: If you wish to make a "clone" of your present HDD then you may download, at no cost, a full-functioning version of “Acronis True Image 10 Home”, usable for a 15 days trial period; get it at http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/do ... trueimage/. If you can manage to clone your hard disk within this period (which you surely can, because the Acronis software is very easy to use!), well, it’ll be completely free! A free Windows XP clone utility, which I don’t know how well functions, is XXclone, see http://xxclone.com/ . If you want to, you can get hold of the "Notebook 2nd Hard Drive Adapter for Ultrabay Slim”, FRU = 41U3148 - see http://www5.pc.ibm.com/europe/products. ... enDocument - and use that while cloning your present HDD onto the new disk.

Good luck with the update!

Regards,

Johan

[awake724]

Thanks for the replies.

I'll be going the 5400 route with a 160 gig Hitachi drive....need space more than the fractional faster speed.

Let's hope all goes smooth!!!

[Johan]

Well, go for Hitachi HDD; I believe that they have a good reputation (although their 2.5" laptop HDD's of the TravelStar-family only comes with a 3-year warranty, in contrast to Seagate's 5-year warranty, for the Momentus-families mentioned above).

By the way, the "Automatic Acoustic Management" option, which is available for the Hitachi drives, is described in page 11 of the documen: "Hitachi Feature Tool Usage Instructions", available at http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/d ... de_203.pdf The Feature Tool itself is available through Hitachi's download page at http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm --> Feature Tool --> http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/d ... eatureTool

According to the Feature Tool manual, the drive you have in mind (Hitachi HTS541616J9AT00) will support AAM.

It could be very interesting to hear about your actual experience with the 160 GB Hitachi drive, once you get it up and running... how does it perform, not the least in terms of noise?

Before you start playing around with swapping drives and cloning etc.; remember to make a set of recovery CD-ROM's, if you haven't already done so... just in case!

Good luck!

Regards,

Johan

[awake724]

Thanks for the advice! I almost forgot about the back up cd-roms...

I've ordered the drive and picked up a kit, the Apricorn EZ Upgrade kit with enclosure so I can use my current 40gb as an external drive.

So I think I'm all set - I'll provide an update once it's done!