A22e hard drive upgrade

[pcengine92]

I'm replacing the original hard drive (which doesn't have a speed listed on it) to a larger hard drive with 5400rpm. Will I notice a difference in boot up time?

[ZaZ]

Absolutely. You can make a pretty good argument the jump from 4200RPM to 5400RPM is more noticeable than from 5400RPM to 7200RPM. You can use the parts look up to see which drive your old machine had. If you're experiencing slow boot times, you may wish to get rid of any ThinkVantage tools that turn on with Windows, if you're not using them, or any other software you're not using.

Link

[rkawakami]

Hard to say for sure. Depending upon the current performance of the original drive, the amount of file fragmentation, the number and types of programs that launch at startup, you may or may not see any significant speed in boot time. The original drive is probably a 4200rpm (Google the FRU or part number). If your current drive is heavily fragmented and the replacement drive receives a fresh OS install (or is cloned, while at the same time the files defragged), then that alone would account for a good decrease in time for loading the OS. If you are concerned about reducing the boot time, there's a few things that you can do for "free":

- run a defragging program
- remove any unnecessary programs from the Startup folder (not all of them may be there; some digging can be required)
- use hibernation instead of a full shutdown; time the difference between a cold boot and restoring from hibernation

[pcengine92]

I installed the new cloned hard drive today, and there's definitely a huge difference between the old and the new. Performance is much better.

[sjthinkpader]

For some reason, newly cloned drives are always pretty badly fragmented. I always do a defrag immediately after cloning.

[sjthinkpader]

I made speed comparison with older 4200RPM (DJSA-220) and newer 5400RPM drives in this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 1&start=30
Latest data around March 21st.