Hard Drive Upgrade Information

[dsvochak]

Recently, the drive in my wife's 560Z crashed. After spending a couple of days thinking about the problem, reading Tom's Hardware Guide and this forum, the most productive upgrade appeared to be to replace the drive in my T21 (2647-4AU) and use the 20g Hitachi (DK23ba-20b) in the 560Z.

There are a lot of hard drive replacement threads here but I haven't found one that's very specific about the level of performance improvement through a faster drive, so I took some gross measurements with a stop watch, before and after, which I'd like to share.

The T21 has a PIII 800 and is running XP SP2 with 384mb of memory. I replaced the Hitachi drive with a 60g Seagate Momentus 5400.2. I can only get an external drive to be recognized if it's attached to the machine USB port. Cloning the Hitachi to the Seagate (using True Image) took about an hour and 50 minutes at USB 1 speeds.

The timing test results are below:

Hitachi Seagate
DK23ba-20b 5400.2
Start to Boot password 12.3 7.6
Boot HD Password to Login 38.5 26.8
Login to Desktop 9.3 7.5 (until AVG is loaded)

Load Organizer 97 3.8 2.4
Load Word Pro 97 3.1 1.4
Load Quattro Pro 11 10.5 5.8
Load Organizer (2nd time) 1.4 .6
Load Word Pro (2nd) 1.3 .7
Load Quattro Pro (2nd) 2.7 2.7
AVG Complete Scan 22m24.6s 16.43.10

Turn Off 17.0 18.5
Restart 58.3 53.2
Logoff 17.7 7.6
Hibernate 15.9 16.4
Return from Hibernation 28.7 26.7

All the numbers are in seconds except for the AVG results. I set the avg scan to scan all files. The Momentus result scanned about 700 more files than the Hitachi result (added some software before the scan).

For comparison purposes, I ran the same tests on a friend's Toshiba Satellite A15-S127 (2g Celeron, 400Mhz system bus, 512mb Memory, Seagate Momentus 60g drive--first generation not Momentus 5400.2). The booting times were somewhat faster (e.g. 20.8 seconds HD password to login screen on the Toshiba). The software load times for the Toshiba and the T21 with the Momentus 5400.2 were virtually identical. Any differences were probably related to differences in starting and stopping the stop watch.

I hope this information is useful for anyone considering a hard drive upgrade.