Fast HDD for T60p

[tsservo]

Hi all. I'm looking to upgrade the stock HDD in my T60p. I currently have the Travelstar 7K100 100gb in my system and I use it heavily for working on large digital photos (14-bit .NEF files out of my D700, 16-20mb each). As it is incredibly laborious waiting for files of that size to load and display I'm looking for something faster. Primary concern is speed, heat and "loudness" is willing to be traded off for speed.

I was looking at the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 which is tempting at 500gb and 3gb/s. But I'm wondering if I'll get everything out of that drive with the T60p... will there be a realistic difference in speed between the two drives?

Going by the numbers (7K100: 1.5Gb/s, 10ms seek, 11ms write, 4.2ms latency vs. Momentus: 3.0Gb/s, 11ms seek, 13ms write) it looks like it would actually be slower, except for that 1.5 vs 3.0Gb/s xfer. Would the T60p take advantage of that or is it limited to 1.5Gb/s?

The other drive I was looking at was the WD Scorpio Black 320gb. Aside from the storage space, would that drive be in a similar situation to the Momentus 7200.4?

Thanks. Tim.

[hausman]

Would the T60p take advantage of that or is it limited to 1.5Gb/s?

I believe it's limited to 1.5Gb/s. The best value these days is the 7K320 which can be had in North America for as little as $60. There have been other threads on this forum that discuss Hitachi vs Seagate vs WD 320GB 7,200 rpm drives. The short answer is that they're all about the same performance, heat and noisewise. I don't see why that would be any different with the 500GB versions.

[ZaZ]

The best drive in terms of the benchmarks is the 7200.4, but as noted in the real world they're all about the same. The larger drive only has value if you need the space.