R60 Upgraded from 50 to 500GB Hard Drive

[robert574]

Hi everyone. The internet is nearly non-existant here in FL due to the massive snow storm across the US (hope you are all ok), but I will try to ask a question. (If necessary, I will continue using the Iphone:)

I have an R60 (type 9457) 1.66 dual core Centrino. It originally had a 50GB HD that was nearly full. About 6 months ago with some suggestions from a friend over the phone, I ordered a new Hitachi 0A57915 Travelstar SATA HD, 5400RPM, 500GB, Serial ATA-300. I also purchased a couple of Aronis tools and imaged the old drive, removed it, put in the new drive and imaged it back. It created three partitions. The first was the OS copy, the second was "Preload (C:)" drive the 50GB from the image, and the third E: drive out of the remaining space about 450MB (D: is the DVD). (I ran CHKDSK and verified everthing along the way). This was successful and booted up fine. I used the Acronis Disk Director and enlarged the D: drive to around 120GB taking space from E: drive. I named E: drive "BLANK_SPACE" and will not store anything on it but rather use it to modify the size of C: drive as time goes on to reduce the backup, defrag, etc. time.

Everything is working well. No problem. The speed seems to be the same as before.

I just ran Everest and it says for the hard drive, I have a "Max UDMA Transfer Mode of UDMA 6 (ATA-133)" and under that says "Active UDMA Transfer Mode of UDMA 2 (ATA-33). This doesn't seem right so I checked the BIOS and the setting was AHCI which was proper for SATA. I don't know why this is or if or how I would change it. My system BIOS date is 10/11/07.

Anyone have any ideas? Is there a way to increase the active speed or does it do it automatically?

[robert574]

Hi, me again.

Just wanted to let you all know that it occurred to me to put the hard drive under stress starting some fast trasfer of some sort. I downloaded a hard drive speed test program and started it on a continuous loop.

I already had Everest open so I looked at it and it was still ATA-33. Then I refreshed it and still was ATA-33. Closed Everest and restarted and it showed max at ATA-133 and active at ATA-133.

So, the hard drive transfer speed at least, must be variable on the R60 and it kicks in when it needs to. My old desktop showed ATA-100 and clocked in at 65 ave and the laptop at ATA-133 with 73 average (sorry I don't remember the units, it's a relative test anyway)

I had 25 views since yesterday and no replies, so I thought you all would be interested. I also looked up the priced of my hard drive now (I paid $80 6 months ago) now they are less than $60.

Edit: also, I read in the specs that the max size for a hard drive in the R60 was 120GB and this 500GB is running fine. I even tested the E: drive partition and it was OK also. Maybe they modified the BIOS since the original spec was written.