For those of you who are interested...

[Rob Mayercik]

As promised, here's an update on my episode of "Replacing your Thinkpad's hard drive in 3 easy steps":

I finally got the EK760 up and running over the weekend.

I actually got the replacement back almost two weeks ago (see http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=9114 for the details), but the block of time needed to do the installation and SW loading didn't present itself until the Monsoons came to NJ.

Anyhow, I have a couple of thoughts/observations to pass along:

1. No issue recognizing this drive on my 2645-45U with latest BIOS. It came right up and seems to be operating flawlessly.

2. It's so quiet! I can't hear it at all unless I get my ear right against the machine by the left side speaker, and even then I can only just hear it if the heads are moving. What a change from the old 5GB Travelstar that the machine came with, and even the now seemingly deceased DK23AA-12 that I just decommissioned.

3. ZipZoomFly's RMA process was painless and pretty quick. I have no complaints on their handling of this issue, and my overall impression of dealing with them is excellent. I wouldn't hesitate to buy from them again.

Now that the "initial track report" is complete, some may recall that I once asked about long bootup time. Specifically, I was seeing the boot proceed normally until the Crystal drivers loaded, and then the machine seemed to stop and wait for up to a minute before continuing to load into Windows (98SE).

Well, I know what was causing it - it was my network card! When I bought the machine, I also picked up a PCMCIA ethernet card (3-Com 3c589) to go with it. Over the weekend I had that card out while installing Windows, and the boot time was blazing fast by comparision. When I put the card in and booted it, the long pause returned. I'm currently using whatever driver was on the Win98 CD, but I downloaded the lastest released driver from 3-Com so I can see if perhaps this is a software bug. More than likely, I'll be leaving that card out out of the machine unless I need it. It should be interesting to see if my wireless card evokes the same reaction (NetGear WG511).

As to that old DK23AA-12 that I mentioned above, I'm thinking about cracking it open to see what's inside. I was getting a continual stream of bad sectors appearing (despite running HDD Regenerator over and over again). When I ran DFT on it, it got as far as checking the SMART operations and declaring them "BAD" and then exited.

Conversations with Hitachi resulted in a rep sending me a copy of their older utility, "diskchk". That program didn't even get that far. It started checking the drive electronics and immediately exited, spitting out the following message:

"The drive did not become standby mode.
Please return the drive to the vendor for service."

I don't know what it would cost to put this thing back in fighting trim, but it would probably cost less to go out and buy one. Of course, I don't know what I'd do with it except mount it in my USB enclosure, or put it in my Desktop and install Fedora on it for experimenting. With the TP now up to 60GB HDD space + CDR/CDRW capability, I don't forsee any larger storage needs there for a while.

To all those who provided advice (especially JHEM), my thanks.

Rob

[stgreek]

Out of curiosity, why did you select the E7k60 over the 7k60? The E7K60 is considered to be a server-class drive and so should (in theory) suffer more from spin-ups and downs during use. Unless of course you are using your laptop 24/7 in which case it is probably more reliable than the 7K60.

Stavros

[Rob Mayercik]

No particular reason overall.

From what I read here, the two drives sounded equal, with the E7K60 being better equipped for extended periods of uptime. I figured that either drive would serve my purposes equally well, and went with the one that was a dollar or three cheaper.

I don't run 24/7, but I have been known to leave the unit on overnight from time to time if there's disk maintenance to be done (like defragging).

Your question got me thinking, so I did a quick comparo between the two units on the hitachi website. There were slight differences between the two in terms of operating temperature and shock, but nothing that I believe would be of concern to me.

Rob