[ltp] New hard drive for T61

[John Jason Jordan]

Thanks for the information. I was considering the Seagate Momentus 7400
rpm 500 GB drive. It's good to hear that it works well in a T61.

However, I just finished reading reviews on Newegg.com. There are about
250 reviews. It seems people give it top rating or bottom rating, with
few in between. The bottom raters all had their drive fail after a few
days to a few months. If the reviews are a guide, the failure rate
seems to be about 20%. 

But I am wondering if the G version has the same issues. 

I agree with your view on impressions v. numbers. I don't care about
numbers either. If it feels faster, that is what I am looking for.


On Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:11:54 +0200
Paul Seelig <pseelig@rumbero.es> dijo:

> Hi John,
> 
> i bought a bigger replacement drive and, in a second step, a
> second faster one just a few months ago. Both times it was a
> Seagate Momentus 500GB disk in its G version, in order to have
> the drive itself take care of any gravitational issues. First
> drive was the 5400rpm speed version, and the second one the
> faster 7200rpm speed version. There actually is a speed
> difference, as the system does feel more responsive thanks to the
> faster disk (running Debian/unstable). As an added benefit, the
> 7200rpm disk comes with a 5 year warranty.
> 
> I didn't bother to measure it, because i am not at all interested
> in any numbers. Don't even really care about whether disk has
> 3.0Gbit/sec or 1.5Gbits/sec throughput. Just being able to simply
> feel the enhanced responsiveness was already enough for me to be
> content with the doubled disk upgrade.
> 
> The slower 5400GB Momentus is now in some cheap "Ultrabay Slim
> SATA HDD Adapter II" imitation. I had to put a jumper on the disk
> to limit its speed to a 1.5 Gb/s data rate, because there was an
> issue for it being recognized by the T61 BIOS 3 (or even 4) out
> of 5 times during startup.
> 
> The jumpering solution for this issue is fully described here:
> 
> http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=193775
> http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=168595
> 
> Might be worth to have this info added to ThinkWiki by some kind soul.
> 
> In any case, it is nice to have so much superfluous disk space
> available for some KVM virtual machines or simply for scratch,
> using the second disk primarily as an almost identical backup
> device by mirroring.
> 
> No, i don't endorse Seagate disks for any economic interest, but
> i do happen to like their Momentus series quite a lot.
> 
> Cheers
> P. *8^)
> 
> John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > When Karmic goes final next week I plan to do a reinstall. But instead
> > of wiping the 160 GB hard drive that came with my T61 I want to buy a
> > new drive, then put the old drive in a USB enclosure. After the new
> > install I'll copy over ~/ and perhaps other things as needed to get
> > things back to the way they currently are (installed programs, etc.).
> > 
> > Normally I do a dist-upgrade, but for some time I have been having
> > issues with Xorg or Gnome or something on Jaunty. I have spent entire
> > days trying to fix it, but there are literally hundreds of libraries,
> > modules, configurations and so on. I give up. 
> > 
> > I'd like a somewhat larger hard disk than the Hitachi 5416 that came
> > with the Thinkpad, maybe around 300 GB. From past discussions that I
> > have read here there are a couple issues:
> > 
> > 1) My dim understanding is that Lenovo did something in the BIOS so
> > that only hard drives bought from them will work. However, I think that
> > is not entirely correct. 
> > 
> > 2) I understand that my T61 has a SATA-2 controller, but Lenovo
> > throttled it to no more than 100 Mb/s. Hence, there is no point in
> > getting a faster hard disk. Yet there may be other issues that would
> > make disk access faster. If possible, I would like as fast a disk as
> > possible, given the controller situation.
> > 
> > So my question is: Are there any T61 users here who have installed
> > larger hard disks? If so, what did you install, and are you happy with
> > its performance?
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