Hard Drive Purchase

Decided to upgrade the 160 gig HD with a 320 7200 .. Western Digital Scorpio Black 320 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD3200BEKT.

Do you think this is a good upgrade, will I notice any speed increase due to the drive having a 16mb cache and 7200 rpm speed ?

Anyway plan to put the 160 in an external case ..

 

Yes, you will notice the speed difference. Enjoy.

 

please don't buy wd as there are power management issues

 

320GB hdd will be a nice $50 upgrade.

 

Please explain.

 

With virtually the same upgrade I've seen a 150-200% increase in disk throughput, from the mid 40MB/s range to almost 80MB/s peak. You're actually upgrading twice with that switch, disk speed with mechanical drives isn't just dependent on RPMs, the increase in data-density plays a major role as well. That 320gb 7200rpm drive is almost on par with my 3.5" 139gb Raptor by some measures.

 

Upgrade complete, and the 320 works very nice. I did a ghost image of my drive prior to the install and even though the drive sizes are different the image was put on the drive with no questions asked and it preforms very well compared to the drive that came in it. I put the 160 drive in an external case and it serves back up duty now.

 

http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=10003&p=72284#p72284

"The default head-parking at idle strategy of some WDC 2.5" SATA drives is very aggressive. Using this default strategy, an affected device would exceed the rated 600,000 load cycle count after only XXX hours. Ordinarily, the aggressiveness of the strategy would be controlled via standard APM commands sent via the host operating system but the affected devices do not respond to APM commands other than at a level where head-parking at idle is disabled completely. This is less than optimal for a mobile device that may be susceptible to disk surface damage if the device is moved whilst the heads are unparked. Also, the device is less likely to enter reduced-power mode whilst the heads are unparked and battery consumption by the host device is therefore likely to be adversely affected."

Only way to alter 8 second park is hdparm value 254 which is never park or using wdidle3.exe to disable idle counter to in effect 254, any value much over the default 8 seconds results in horrible clicking and doesn't adjust idling as expected.
So you either have zero head parking or shortened drive life due to excessive load count. All the WD drives are currently affected and people with green drive server raid arrays have been going ape about it.

Personally for my money I have a 320gb Hitachi HTS543232L9A300, which you can set minimum head parking value with utility or just use laptop-mode and hdparm to control it battery I use value 220 and it has a freefall sensor, ac I use 254.

 

I havent noticed any issues with my drive, no clicking, or any other anomaly for that matter, it is much faster than the drive I removed ( 160 GIG )...

 

just keep an eye on drive load count cycle, we have been experiencing up to 124 an hour, rated cycles 600,000.

also can you hear a very soft sweeping noise evey 8 seconds?

 

Not really sure how to check the load count, I am running windows xp sp3 .. I also dont hear any sweeping type noises. I am using the AA1 utility to control the fan and cancel the drive clicking ..

 

By canceling the drive clicking you are in fact disabling APM which aims to protect from head crash and save power on battery.

Providing smart has been enabled on the drive- any smart compatible drive utility will report load count.

Quiet drive tools on a laptop unless they park heads sensibly and use acoustic management setting, are no better than crapware.

 

please, i need to buy another hdd for my AA1, can i install the samsung HM250JI without any motherboard modification? (just connect the samsung in the same way like the toshiba mk1652gsx) or i have change something (maybe connectors or whatever)?? Thanks for your help. (by the way i probed the GTA Vice City and Unreal Tournament 2004 in the AA1 and runs great, AA1 rules!!!)

 

Yes, straight swap, enjoy.

 

Hey dude . . . may I know where did you bought this ?? also can you please tell me how much memory do you got after formatting for the first time ?? was it less than 300GB ??

Thanks dude . . .

 

Any recommendations for a 500 gig drive? Power consumption would be a higher priority than high speeds.

 

just stay away from WD as they are a fatally flawed POS

 

I just swapped out my 160gb for the Samsung 1.8" SLC SSD. When running speed fan, you cannot even tell the AA1 is on . I also went from 2hrs on a full battery to 3:15 Random Access is now 0.4ms and Average Read is 86.6 MB/s. The 1/8" drive is small enough with room to spare in the HD cage with the adapter. I will post pics later.

The only down side was having to purchase a Micro SATA to SATA adapter. Drive was $110 adapter was $15.

 

I swapped my 160GB for the Seagate 500GB in the link below about one month ago. Ghosted the original 160 then copied image to new drive. Had to expand the partition after the swap to read the full 500GB (actually 450GB, but that is a different story). Its working great! It was a little loud at first which worried me, but now practically silent.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=1277

 

I finally got some pics up with the Samsung along with HDtach

Check out my copper heatsink too

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