new x61 and question about hard drive

[ArMiXiA]

I just purchased an X61 and am loving it. Although I got it with the 5400rpm 120gb hard drive, eventually in the next month I want to install a 200gb 7200rpm HD but is there a software program where I can clone the old hard drive to the new one if i connect both to my desktop through USB cables & HD Enclosures?

[3rods]

You can use norton ghost or you can use a free version called PING

http://ping.windowsdream.com/

I've never used PING, but it comes highly recommended. With anything like this, you may want to do a few dry runs first. Like, back up a non-boot disk and restore it to another HD with a different size.

I've had pretty good results with Norton, but I don't know if it will restore an image that is, say 40GB to a 60GB or greater sized drive. I wouldn't see why not.

Found this on cnet:

In addition to backup, Ghost 10 offers a Copy My Hard Drive function that replicates the complete contents of one hard drive onto another--very helpful if you are upgrading your system drive to a larger hard disk.

So, maybe it will work. I've never used that particular function.

[ZaZ]

Acronis True Image would be another option.

[3rods]

I've always had bad results with acronis, YMMV of course.

Either it wouldn't restore correctly or it would and my MBF was messed up or it couldn't handle my NTFS and ext3 file systems together. I dunno, it was just a mess. I've heard similar stories from other admins about acronis.

I worked on the largest e-discovery project in history and they used ghost to keep drives for litigation hold. It seemed to work ok.

I hear good things about veritas, but that's not exactly a home user solution.

[PRGeno]

If you're running Vista (Business or Ultimate) you can use Vista's Complete PC Backup and Restore to do the job.

It will create a partition the same size as your old drive on the new drive. Then you can either create another partition for the remaining space, or use another cool Vista feature which allows you to expand the system partition to the entire size of the new hard disk.

I believe you will lose the Lenovo recovery partition as Vista won't do anything with that, like Ghost would.

[andrzej]

easy with
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/suppor ... iscwizard/ DiscWizard
FYI in my case ThP X60s wXP source hdd
Toshiba 80GB, 5400RPM, 8MB Buffer, SATA/150MB/sec [MK8034GSX]
with pm8 was divided to: service + 4 partitions (os, ng.img, data, fun)
than on second partition plain ng.images (service & os - easy return from ng.img)

after 6 mths was cloned with DiscWizard to
Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB, 5400RPM, 8MB cache, SATA/150 [ST9160821AS]
from ng.img return to source OS

then after next 6 mths was cloned with DiscWizard to
Hitachi TravelStar 7K200 200 GB 7200, 16MB, SATA/150 [HTS722020K9SA00]
from ng.img return to source OS

[damascus]

I would advise against upgrading the HDD. The 7200rpm drive may offer a marginal performance increase, but it comes at the expense of heat -- serious heat if you are using graphics programs or anything that hits your swap file. I would recommend waiting until SolidState drive prices drop. Should be able to get ~80GB by end of year I'm HOPING. Just food for thought

[EOMtp]

... The 7200rpm drive may offer a marginal performance increase, but it comes at the expense of heat -- serious heat ...

This is incorrect. The Hitachi 7K200 drives offer a palpable increase in performance over 5400RPM drives at zero increase in heat. (Probably also true of the Seagate drives, but I do not know first-hand.)

[damascus]

How do you know this? Have you run ArtRage in your X61t yet? Perhaps you should before you make statements like these..?

[proaudioguy]

How do you know this? Have you run ArtRage in your X61t yet? Perhaps you should before you make statements like these..?

It is quite well known around here that the 7200 RPM drives do not have noticeable Temp issues. I haven't noticed any heat problem.

I base my info from actual use for the last 2 years.
Where do you get your information?

Exactly what do you consider a problem in regards to heat?