portable hd vs. ultra bay vs. dvd drive

[allen]

hi, i've had my T60p for 9 months now,
i barely ever use the cd/dvd drive.
i've burned maybe 4 cds, 0 dvds
watched a few dvds, and that's probably it.
i always avoid burning cds as it is, and use my ftp mostly.

i do however have a lacie porshe 160gb portable USB2 drive that i use nearly every day. i don't like the drive to be spinning unless i'm actually using it, so i plug and unplug when i'm using and not using, and always have to use the safely remove hardware function.

when i'm at my desk on the advanced mini dock it's no big deal, but when i travel, which is about... 1/4-1/3 the time i use it, it can be a hassle to dig out the portable drive, and plug it in, when say sitting on a plane/car/train

the 160gb's getting full, so i'm considering my options.

anyone have bad or really good experiences using the ultrabay hard drive adapter? power/heat or weight wise, is it not worth the extra money?
can you turn it off and stop the drive from spinning without taking it out? (it seems when i safely remove a usb drive, if the usb is still plugged in, it's still spinning, it doesn't have a power button)

what's the largest drive you can get in there now, 200gb 7200rpm?
the lacie porshe drives are only 5400rpm, 8mb buffer, newest one is now 250gb.

i'd imagine transferring files with ultrabay drive is much faster than usb2?

i saw there is a 200gb 7200rpm option if you buy a new thinkpad today, how much of a hassle is it to swap hard drives on your already installed and running system? not worth it coming from a 100gb 7200rpm drive? i know it can be done, but is it pretty much risk free in terms of data and system setup?

any info would be great, thanks!

[SHoTTa35]

Well the first thing is that USB drives only power off when they have no power. With USB you can provide only power and no connectivity (such as some cell phone charger cables) so the drive will run as long as it has power since Windows doesn't control that.

It's a lil different with the UltraBay adapter and rightly so The UltraBay is an extention of the chipset so Windows sees it just like a normal drive. Therefore, Windows' power management features such as turning off drive after x amount of minutes will work on devices there.

So if i were you i'd go that route. I barely use my optical drive also. I burned maybe 1-3 discs since i got this thing. So what i've done now is stick a 16GB PATA SSD into the main drive bay and use the UltraBay adapter with a 120GB drive for storing data (music/movies and the like) Vista flies when running off the SSD so i'm loving it (WEI score of 5.3 - normally you'd need a Hitachi 7200 drive to get those scores but the SSD is -300% lighter on power usage!) This way i get my speed and my storage and none of the crazy power drain

[allen]

ok so, do the rpms not really make a difference when using for data storage? and opening/moving/copying large amounts of data?

and isn't it ideal to have about 25% free space on a drive? is that only for a drive w/ the OS and software? or with a data drive too?

i have the 100gb 7200 rpm in here now, partitioned at 40GB for OS and software, and 60 for data.
and i think i would want another 7200rpm at least 100gb drive, preferably more, to have a lot of storage space.

i don't know how you can fit your OS and software on 16GB! or is it only the OS? still!

[allen]

are my questions really newb for this forum?
i search up and down the internet, and it's hard to find a definitive answer.

if i didn't like having the drive in the bay, couldn't i just get an external casing for say the hitachi 7200 200gb drive, as long as it's SATA?

i don't want to just assume yes, because, why are there no portable drives available to buy that are 7200 rpm and 200gb?

[SHoTTa35]

i would get a slower drive, a 250GB 5400RPM one and put it in there. Since you said LARGE amounts of data i guess the 7200RPM would be ideal for it's faster write speed but how often are you doing that. i'd guess once you move the data there it's just reading it which a 7200RPM would help too but eehh.. You already have the 7200RPM drive but why wouldn't you want it internal, it's a much cleaner solution than having cabls sticking out all over the place.

As for my 16GB SSD - well Vista and Office and a few other apps take up about 8GBs of it, i still have 7.33GB left. Works for me.

And the USB 2.0 external solution could possibly work also but i think you'll be limited by the bus speeds. Internal controllers work much faster. Even tho it's 480Mbps you'll probably only get about 30MB/s max, most 5400RPM drives can give you 40-50MB/s writes internally.

[allen]

i just realized you wrote SSD,
is that really much faster? for startup and running the OS?
i think i read announcemnts of really large SSD 2.5" drives, like 400GB? sounds pretty insane.

i'm currently using about 30GB on my software/OS partition...

what functions exactly do the 7200 rpm make faster, i know it means it's spinning faster, so i'd assume copying and reading, what about opening files off of? wouldnt that be more concerned with your RAM?

anyhow, i'm kind of impatient, so when they say something's faster i tend to go for it.

so i guess no issues of overheating on having 2 7200rpm drives?
i already have fan noises, soo annoying, posted the issue on another post, but no solution yet.

[SHoTTa35]

Well that's why i said a 5400RPM drive in the first place. You get more storage space plus you get a quieter running system.

And yes the SSD makes this thing fly. If you want to compare, Vista and the Hitachi 7k100 scores a 5.1 on it's WEI thingy. My SSD Drive even tho it's only IDE and UDMA-66/ATA-4 at that. If it was UDMA-133/ATA-6 It could possibly be pushing lots more data. Since it's MAX speed is 66MBps i get a burst of about that much and sustained read speeds of 51MB/s, This is all thru the 16GBs. You know how you always see those graphs starting off at a high 66Mbps and then dropping down to 38Mbps at the end? This is one FLAT light going all the way from start to finish. That plus the .1ms Access Time as well as the no power usage (.7W vs 3.3W) You have a much faster and quieter (no moving parts) and cooler (once again, no moving parts so no friction so no heat). There are some out there that top out at 101MB/s - no that's not Megabits, i'm talking MegaBYTES - namely MTRON. Those things are like $1500 for 32GB tho.

So are SSDs (even the "cheap" ones) worth it? Probbably not for most people, if you're on XP almost all of the newer drives will be purring right along but for someone with Vista and wants to see Vista come alive on their laptop then SSDs is where that performance lives, well either that or get a 7200RPM Hitachi 7k200 drive (5.4 in Vista's WEI) Still tho, the power benefits, granted it's not that much - maybe an extra 40mins (in my estimates) is worth it for me.

[allen]

well, heck, i can't decipher all that tech talk, but i'll take your word for it, it's too bad they're so expensive, and still not very large.

especially because, when they are more available, all the new OS's and software will probably require much more, and then you never really get work done faster.

my drive's noise doesnt really bother me... it's something related to the fan spinning...

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