T410 and third-party hard drives?

[C-H]

Hi!

My new T410 (250Gb FDE) will arrive tomorrow, and hopefully the first thing that I will do (after making the recovery disks) is replacing the drive with something bigger and snappier, without Full Disc Encryption.

I've heard rumours that just chucking in any new drive could be a bit adventurous, and I could really use some help and advice on this matter.

Are the T410 just as "locked" as the old T4x? (http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11059)

Also, will the FDE give me any specific trouble when I try to use that disk as a portable drive?

Any input is much appreciated!

/Carl-Henrik

Former 600E, 600X, T20, A21, T30 user, soon a happy T410 owner!

[Navck]

Slot any SATA HDD that fits, you'll be fine.
IMO in the 7.2k market, I recommend a Scorpio Black in 320GB (Or possibly wait for the next refresh) or the Lenovo shipped Hitachi option of the Travelstar 7k500 in 320GB (No experience with the larger option yet.)

I do not recommend the Seagate drives as of now, until they get their game together and start performing as well as their benchmarks imply they do. (They optimize for benchmarks, anyone can do this. Optimizing for real life usage? Different story.)

[LegendaryKA8]

I've got a Hitachi 7K500 in 500GB and it works great. 7200RPM spindle speed, and from what I've seen it benchmarks as one of the fastest notebook HDDs you can get. Win7 runs snappy and I'm not disappointed with the performance. I need a lot of HDD space so SSDs aren't my cup of tea just yet, both in capacity and price. With the T410, it should be fully plug and play so you'll have no issues like those encountered with the T43.

Stay away from the WD 640GB drives. I was using one as a media drive in the Ultrabay until it started throwing SMART errors after only two months.

[Navck]

The Scorpio Blue? Do you have any evidence that the 640GB Scorpio Blue line would have a subpar design? (Such as the thin layer of lubrication on the platters evaporating and condensing onto the head?)

If not, then your statistical sample size is "1" and that isn't large enough to make any statements about reliability unless you have some inside information leaked to you by engineers speculating on the design. Please try not to do that with harddrives, they're pretty amazing for having failure rates of... Well, one in a million, compared to the earlier generations that had numbers closer to one in tens of thousands.

[ZaZ]

I'd vote buy on price. They all perform about the same to me in real world usage if it one or the other scores better in some benchmark. Typical notebook usage isn't very demanding for the hard drive anyway. You're not likely to see one drive be markedly better. The one drive that might be worth waiting for is the Seagate Momentus XT. It's a standard hard drive mated to a 4GB SSD, but I don't think it's out yet. That said, if you need one now, there have been some pretty good deals on the 7k500 of late. Didn't Frys have it for $64 last week after rebate?

[Harryc]

+1 for 320GB WD Scorpio Black or 500GB Hitachi 7K500.

[LegendaryKA8]

The Scorpio Blue? Do you have any evidence that the 640GB Scorpio Blue line would have a subpar design? (Such as the thin layer of lubrication on the platters evaporating and condensing onto the head?)

If not, then your statistical sample size is "1" and that isn't large enough to make any statements about reliability unless you have some inside information leaked to you by engineers speculating on the design. Please try not to do that with harddrives, they're pretty amazing for having failure rates of... Well, one in a million, compared to the earlier generations that had numbers closer to one in tens of thousands.

Alright... from the reviews here at Newegg, it doesn't seem like I'm the only one to have this problem: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductRe ... %29&Page=2

However, playing the devil's advocate here, this may be a QC fluke or a bad batch sent to Newegg(where I purchased mine). Yet seeing several of these drives end up as paperweights has me a little worried, even if these are remarks on just one site. Since it seems like you've got a decent knowledge of what can go wrong internally in a HDD and perhaps have more insight on me than this, what is your take on the WD Scorpio Blues, as far as a reliability standpoint? Is there a chance of getting one from a bad lot that somehow missed quality control?

This is the first new hard drive I've had fail on me. I've had a few others go out throughout the years but that's only after 5+ years of operating life. If you believe this could be a fluke and I should just RMA this one and try a replacement, then I'll do it. I don't have anything bad to say about Scorpio Blues, as I have two 500GB models in my M1730 at this moment, and they've served me nearly two years without any issues... I am simply concerned about this particular model that seems to be giving me and a few other people a tough time.

[Navck]

As of now I trust WD in these products:
Scorpio Black, Blue, Caviar Black, RE3, RE4, Velociraptors and the older Raptors.
The Caviar Black and RE3/4 are built on the same "platform." In a way, the Caviar Blacks are just rebinned RE3s. Just as their Green edition drives are rebinned from production for not making the cut in one spec but being able to be used in a different manner and meeting those specs. (Don't quote me on this, info might be out of date)

For Hitachi, I would trust their mobile HDDs but I wouldn't be able to say anything on their desktop or enterprise drives.
Hitachi's mobile tech, from what I've heard from a HDD engineer, is kind of behind in the head territory. Apparently they do in house for the HDD heads and well, haven't kept up from the industry in that area.

I would not touch anything from Seagate's consumer and especially mobile line. Their enterprise drives are OK from what I've heard.
Oh and related to that epoxy thing, Seagate suffered from that at one point. Their solution? The harddrive would... Well, clean the head by shaking it during idle or thermal recal to remove the lubrication off. (Yes HDDs have lubrication on the platter.)

Newegg's reviews I wouldn't trust. Remember most reviews have a terrible problem in the signal to noise area, I can say this whole heartly about laptops as well (How many negative reviews are there about the T410 but how about the glowing ones about Macbook/Pros when the latter has actual problems?)

Paperweight? Go bother WD. They give you a 3/5 year warranty on the drive and if it fails they'll have to honor it. As for harddrive failure, a lot of things (Enough to deforest the amazon when printed) can go horribly wrong. It could be overlooking something during the design stage and having a flawed design that fails prematurely and/or in specific conditions. It could be a supplier screwup (Funny how harddrives work, profit on tiny margins, try to sell a lot of them and they only cost 10-30 dollars to make but R&D is the biggest part.) with some bad parts arriving. (HDD companies are not totally intergrated in parts. Seagate had issues on platter yields so they sourced those from somewhere else for a while.)

As far as I can tell from what I'm told, WD is pretty competent as of now in HDD companies, Seagate suffering from some internal bloat, Hitachi suffering from their research goals being set too far in the future. Toshiba(Fujitsu HDDs got bought out) and Samsung are too small to determine anything about.