Thinking of buying a replacement hd

[lilmanmgf]

I just got my T61p through my school about 3 weeks ago, and I am looking to reformat. I really don't want to loose the hidden partition though, so I was thinking of buying a new hard drive, and doing the 64bit upgrade on that. According to Sandra, my hd is a 160gb Hitachi 7200rpm with 15mb of cache. How big of a performance hit will I take if I get a 5400 rpm seagate momentus?

[Dead1nside]

Significant since the hard drive is usually the bottleneck.

[zern]

From my readings, comparing HD performance is not purely about rotational speed. The data density matters too.

A 7200rpm 100Gb drive can have a similar read/write performance to a 250Gb 5400rpm drive. This is because the data is more densely packed on the slower drive which makes fetching stuff potentially as fast.

See http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard ... e,675.html

Have fun!

[lilmanmgf]

Well I decided to go with a 250gb 7200.3 Momentus ASG drive. It should preform as good or better than my current drive. Since it includes the g-force sensor and shock protection as hardware on the drive, should I not install Lenovo active protection?

[zern]

250Gb at 7200 should be nice.

If I were you I would leave the Lenovo HD protection thing installed. I believe it will also protect a second HD in the ultrabay should you ever have one in there.

[Dead1nside]

A good choice, I just picked up the Seagate Momentus 7200.2 200GB 7200RPM HDD. I didn't notice that Seagate had brought out a new revision otherwise I would have got the 320GB when the price came down.

[lilmanmgf]

Yeah, I got the 7200.3 at compsource.com, $89 shipped.

http://www.compsource.com/pn/ST9250421ASG/Seagate_394/

It looks like they have the 320 for 102 shipped, but its out of stock.

http://www.compsource.com/pn/ST9320421ASG/Seagate_394/

Both specify ASG in the sku number, so it is the G-force sensor enabled. Tom's Hardware rate the Momentus 7200.3 drives as the fastest on their notebook hd table right now.

[Blue Thunder]

If I were you I would leave the Lenovo HD protection thing installed. I believe it will also protect a second HD in the ultrabay should you ever have one in there.

I was under the impression that the harddrive protection system only protected the primary harddrive, not anything in the ultrabay. Though I'd really love it if it did - anyone know for sure?

I guess if it doesn't you'd have to make sure your ultrabay harddrive had its own protection system.