7200 Hard Drive for T42 ?

Message

dantor · #1 Post by **dantor** » Fri May 20, 2011 8:40 pm

I recently replaced the original hard drive of my T42 with a WDC WD3200BEVE 320 MB 5400 RPM. While I have much more space, I find my T42 much too slow now. Can I put in a 7200 RPM hard drive in its place? If so which one?

Q-Ball · #2 Post by **Q-Ball** » Fri May 20, 2011 10:08 pm

Any 2.5" PATA drive should do.

lukee · #3 Post by **lukee** » Sat May 21, 2011 1:15 am

Hi,
WD3200BEVE is one of the fastest ATA HDDs for laptops! Any 7200RPM ATA HDD will be slower than this Western Digital, as the ATA 7200RPM HDD's production stopped at 100GB (50GB per platter) capacity, this Western Digital has much more higher platter density (160GB per platter) = is faster.

dantor · #4 Post by **dantor** » Sat May 21, 2011 7:43 am

Thank you for the input. From what you wrote, lukee, it looks like I am stuck with a slow HDD.

pianowizard · #5 Post by **pianowizard** » Sat May 21, 2011 8:00 am

dantor wrote:I find my T42 much too slow now.

You mean your previous hard drive was much faster? What kind of drive was that?

#6 Post by **GomJabbar** » Sat May 21, 2011 8:23 am

I have a 60GB Hitachi 7200 rpm drive in my T42. I believe that's what it came with (I bought it used). As Q-Ball wrote: "Any 2.5" PATA drive should do."

Make sure you are not stuck in PIO mode for some reason. You should be using Ultra DMA 5.

http://classic-web.archive.org/web/2008 ... /udma_fix/

dantor · #7 Post by **dantor** » Sat May 21, 2011 5:45 pm

pianowizard wrote:You mean your previous hard drive was much faster? What kind of drive was that?

My previous HDD was HITACHI HTS721080G9T00 SLIM IDE (7200 RPM, 80GB) bought in 2007. I never had to wait for most applications. The WD 5400 I have now is much much slower. Not much fun.

pianowizard · #8 Post by **pianowizard** » Sat May 21, 2011 6:19 pm

dantor wrote:My previous HDD was HITACHI HTS721080G9T00 SLIM IDE (7200 RPM, 80GB) bought in 2007. I never had to wait for most applications. The WD 5400 I have now is much much slower.

I believe you. I once compared a 250GB 5400rpm WD IDE drive with a 100GB 7200rpm Seagate IDE, both running the exact same programs on the exact same Thinkpad (an i Series 1124 with 500MHz PII and 256MB RAM), and the 7200rpm drive seemed significantly faster. Strangely, when I benchmarked these drives on that Thinkpad, the 5400rpm drive scored a bit better.

lukee · #9 Post by **lukee** » Sun May 22, 2011 3:16 am

I found some benchmarks, where the performance icrease with newest 5400rpm HDDs can be seen.

This is HDTune benchmark of Hitachi Travelstar 7k100 (biggest 7200rpm ATA HDD for notebooks):

And this is benchmark of WD3200BEVE:

Only winner is the WD3200BEVE in Access Time test (about 1ms faster).

dantor · #10 Post by **dantor** » Sun May 22, 2011 8:31 am

pianowizard wrote:I once compared a 250GB 5400rpm WD IDE drive with a 100GB 7200rpm Seagate IDE, both running the exact same programs on the exact same Thinkpad (an i Series 1124 with 500MHz PII and 256MB RAM), and the 7200rpm drive seemed significantly faster. Strangely, when I benchmarked these drives on that Thinkpad, the 5400rpm drive scored a bit better.

Pianowizard's experiment concurs with lukee that in benchmarks the 5400rpm drive is faster than the 7200rpm. However according to pianowizard, in reality, the computer with the 7200rpm drive ran faster. In order to find out if that would be the case with my T42, I would have to buy a 7200rpm drive and test it. I checked a few stores in Toronto but they only have 5400rpm PATA IDE drives.

ajkula66 · #11 Post by **ajkula66** » Sun May 22, 2011 9:20 am

Chances of finding a genuine NOS 7200rpm laptop drive are pretty slim, I'm sorry to say, and the folks who actually have some leftover stock are pricing them accordingly...

The best-performing (in my experience) 5400rpm drive is Samsung HM160HC, which runs fast, cool and quiet. I was fairly unimpressed with WD 320GB - maybe I just ran into a couple of substandard pieces - but I liked the 250GB version better.

My $0.02 only...

FTC · #12 Post by **FTC** » Mon May 23, 2011 3:43 am

Hi,

Note that if you compare a 100GB 7200 hard disk to a short stroked 320GB 5400 one, the latter would even win in access time (the reduced and faster seek time would compensate the added rotational latency), and be still a lot faster in data transfer rate, ergo in today's world and comparing equal for equal it makes NO sense at all to try to find one of those old PATA 2.5 7200 drives.

dantor · #13 Post by **dantor** » Mon May 23, 2011 8:08 am

FTC wrote:Note that if you compare a 100GB 7200 hard disk to a short stroked 320GB 5400 one, the latter would even win in access time (the reduced and faster seek time would compensate the added rotational latency), and be still a lot faster in data transfer rate, ergo in today's world and comparing equal for equal it makes NO sense at all to try to find one of those old PATA 2.5 7200 drives.

I am coming to the conclusion that I should get used to my slow drive.

lukee · #14 Post by **lukee** » Mon May 23, 2011 8:32 am

dantor wrote:I am coming to the conclusion that I should get used to my slow drive.

Nothing is lost yet... Please download the HDTune application and install it:
http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

And then share the results from benchmark here. Then we can investigate what can be wrong.

dantor · #15 Post by **dantor** » Mon May 23, 2011 12:05 pm

Here is the benchmark, which, I must admit, I don't know how to read.

or here, if the above does not work not work: http://jalbum.net/en/a/974721/

Thank you.

FTC · #16 Post by **FTC** » Mon May 23, 2011 1:06 pm

Hi, this image looks absolutely normal. Are you sure you don't have a bloatware or fragmentation problem ? Have you tried to do a cleanup of the system (good tool : ccleaner) ... and / or registry ?

dantor · #17 Post by **dantor** » Mon May 23, 2011 3:20 pm

FTC wrote:Hi, this image looks absolutely normal. Are you sure you don't have a bloatware or fragmentation problem ? Have you tried to do a cleanup of the system (good tool : ccleaner) ... and / or registry ?

I am sure I don't have "bloatware" and I clean the registry and defragment the drive regularly, and I don't have any virus, trojans, etc.

hunterman223 · #18 Post by **hunterman223** » Mon May 23, 2011 5:05 pm

ajkula66 wrote:Chances of finding a genuine NOS 7200rpm laptop drive are pretty slim, I'm sorry to say, and the folks who actually have some leftover stock are pricing them accordingly...

The best-performing (in my experience) 5400rpm drive is Samsung HM160HC, which runs fast, cool and quiet. I was fairly unimpressed with WD 320GB - maybe I just ran into a couple of substandard pieces - but I liked the 250GB version better.

My $0.02 only...

Seconded. I have nothing other than good praise for that drive. Still effortlessly humming away in my R40 which I passed on to some relatives. I got mine new for something like $50 on eBay, so a good bargain for an IDE drive, as they are becoming more and more rare, and as you put the prices reflect it.

Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk