X31 Hard Disk Upgrade

[vagabonder]

I recently acquired a used Thinkpad X31 and I couldn’t be happier with its features and performance.

Inevitably, I’m ready to upgrade the hard disk to a higher capacity. I’ve narrowed my choices to the 80GB HITACHI Travelstar 7K100 and the 120GB Western Digital Scorpio WD1200VE

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822146047

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136007

I’m leaning toward the Western Digital since I’m willing to sacrifice speed for lower power consumption and cooler operation, plus the more capacity the better. Still, several posts in this forum point to significant overall performance improvement with the 7K100. I’d welcome any comments to help me make up my mind. The unit came with 512 MB RAM but I’m sure I’ll upgrade that too in the near future.

[zone]

I had similar dilemma while ago and I got 7K100, and Im glad that I did. Power consumption difference seems to be negligible and performance benefits are enjoable on daily basis.

[solitude]

the 7k100

[XEQtor]

Just did a sucessful HDD swap to the WD Scorpio this week.

My decision for the Scorpio over the Toshiba & Samsung models are that the Scorpio runs quieter and feels less hot. I equate noise and heat to battery consumption.

I also sacrificed speed for battery life by geting the slower 5400 rpm Scorpio. However, solitude also wrote here that the 7200rpm model may even consume less power. Not sure how a faster spining motor can consume less - both are modern drives. And one of the Scorpio's selling point is "low power". If not for battery life, I wld insist on any 7200 rpm model.

HDD model decision is relatively easier. The tougher part is how to migrate data over from the old one. Know that the X31 uses HPA (2 kinds depending on date of production) for system diagnostics/recovery/restore. The later HPA (3.5GB) can only be accessed by using IBM released software tools (found in the HPA itself). You dont migrate the HPA over properly, the "Access IBM" blue button will no longer work.

XEQ.

[solitude]

the 7k100 faster and much more reliable.

WD drives have a tendency to silently die. ;)

The hitachis run cool, fast, and dont impact batt life (I get the same batt life with the 7.2k as with my old 4.2k)

There are only 2 HDD makers to trust in my experience, Hitachi and Seagate.

[zappb]

Xetor how did you migrate the partition over correctly?

[solitude]

Read this paper:
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib. ... leHDDs.pdf

Contains a brief outline of why the Hitachi 7.2k rpm drives have such a low power consumption.

[zappb]

any decent 160gig hd for the x31?

[codek]

wait a minute i thought x31 ran on a 1.8 drive, so it runs on a 2.5

[GRTMan]

How I cloned my IBM Thinkpad X31 Hard Disk onto a larger disk

7th May 2011

I have a Hitachi HTS541680J9AT00 80 GB hard disk (5400 rpm) which had earlier been fitted to my 2004 X31 machine which originally had a 40GB disk.

My disk was getting close to full.

I researched on the web and found the Samsung HM160HC 160GB 5400prm PATA/IDE 8MB 2.5 inch Hard Drive which had many glowing reports. I found it online for £39 including shipping. I ordered it from Amazon and it arrived the next day.

First thing I did was to install my Apricorn EZ GIG II Cloning Software from the CD I have. (Actually I think this step is unnecessary, see later; I actually used the free version of EZ GIG III available from the Apricom website).

But EZ GIG II would not install until I connected my Apricorn EZ Upgrade Disk holder (to which I had fitted the new 160 GB Samsung Drive). Then EX GIG II installed OK.

I decided to look at the Apricorn site to see if there was an upgrade for the EZ GIG II software. ( www.apricorn.com ). There was not, but I noticed you could download a newer version: EZ GIG III. So I downloaded the EZ GIG III software.

EZ GIG III is an EXE file and when double clicked, it offers to “Start EZ GIG III” or “Create Bootable Medium”.

So first I made a CD ROM boot disk.

Then I selected the EZ GIG III button and by the use of easy menu choices it automatically found the source and destination disks. I confirmed the details and after one hour, the job was finished. I just then took out the old Hitachi 80GB drive and installed the new Samsung 160GB into my X31. This bit took about 5 minutes and involved 5 screws (all Philip heads).

I then rebooted and it recognised the new drive, and then after about 5 minutes asked me to reboot again to incorporate the new drivers. I did that and it rebooted fine.

Using Windows Explorer I checked and now instead of a few GB free, I have a massive 85 GB free!

Then I started up Diskeeper and defragmented the new drive.

And that was that. No problems and dead easy.

I have retained the old drive as a backup, since it’s only worth £25 or so.