HDD and Power Requirements

First post so please be gentle... right lol

I am a happy owner of a AAO 150 with 160GB HDD, 1GB RAM and now that I have successfully gotten the AAO to triple boot XP/Win 7/OS X the need for a larger hard drive is warranted. In doing research on different hard drives, I found some interesting facts. First of which, the drive that comes with my AAO is a Seagate Momentus 5400.5 ST9160310AS and according to the research I have done, it has one of the lowest Peek Power requirements of most other drives. It also rated as one of the lowest in idle power requirements as well. (See Tom's Hardware article for reference: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hard-drive,2006-16.html ) And according to Seagate's reference page, the 320GB version of this 5400.5 drive has the same exact power requirements as the 160GB. At first blush, this was going to be my upgrade of choice, but I was also looking at the 7200.3 version as well thinking increased rpm would speed up the experience.

My question is has anyone noticed any difference in battery life due to their upgrading their HDD? I would like specifics to which HDD you chose and what difference it has made to the user experience on the AAO.

Thanks!
(P.S. And big thanks to everyone who has posted in this board, you have made my AAO experience quite enjoyable!)

 

That's an interesting link.

According to the specs on WDC's website the 7200rpm (Scorpio Black) and 5400rpm (Scorpio Blue) versions of their 320GB HDs have exactly the same power consumption. I find this hard to believe, I suspect that some juducious cutting 'n' pasting was used to prepare the website content.

The Seagate Momentus 7200.3 looks like a winner to me.

 

Running Seagate Momentus 7200.3 250 Gb HDD.

I have dropped 10(+/-) minutes of life off of my three cell, but I did the HDD and wireless upgrade at the same time, and I think it is a combination of the two causing my shorter battery life.

It is a trade; i.e., I have less battery life (slightly) but I can get more work done in that time due to the increased speed of the drive and the wireless. Also, I have found that if you turn off your pagefile (if you have upgraded memory, Windows will accept it. When I had 1 Gb RAM, it would force me to have a pagefile) that it will increase your batt life, and if anything speeds Windows up a little bit.

The drive-speed upgrade is definitely worthwhile. It makes the entire experience with the One more pleasing and snappy. Programs load quicker, install quicker, etc. Windows loads quicker, too.

My six cell (Acer) that I ordered Wednesday will be here today, so I am not that worried, anyway.

Edit: The only drawback I have found is that a1ctl will not control the HD clicks with this drive, so I am using Quiet HDD. No big deal...

 

If you are running the Intel card in 'N' mode then I would expect to see more power consumption over the Atheros b/g card.

Thanks for the tip about the pagefile. I have the pagefile switched off on my A110 with SSD with no issues, but still have it switched on on our A150. I'm waiting for a 6-cell to arrive for the A150 but will certainly give the "swap-less" config a whirl in the meantime.

I'm going to try Notebook Hardware Control, maybe I can squeeze a bit more out of the battery by undervolting the Atom. The technique seems to work in Linux using a custom PHC profile.

 

Thanks for the information. Due to the relative minimal impact that you have seen on your system (approx -10 minutes) with the 7200.3 HDD upgrade, the fact I obtained a 6-cell battery and the price difference between the 5400.5 and the 7200.3 is only $20 CAD for the 320GB model, I think that this will be my upgrade route.

Thanks for the advice!

 

definitely go for the 7200.3, the access times on the 5400.5 are awful, much worse than the 5400.4 or 5400.6.
You could also consider some of the 500GB drives, as they are not much more than the 7200.3, and they have very good transfer rates. Access times are slower but not as bad as the 5400.5.

 

My HDTune results, before and after the upgrade:[attachment=0:31x4yiws]HDTune_Benchmark_ST9250421ASG.png[/attachment:31x4yiws][attachment=1:31x4yiws]HDTune_Benchmark_ST9160310AS.png[/attachment:31x4yiws]

Hope these may help someone. Notice the drastic difference in seek time in the graphic display (the yellow dots). Now my average transfer is the same as my old maximum. Comments?

 

Your 160GB hdd's seek time is very high. My 5400rpm WD 160gb stock hdd seek time is almost the same as your 7200rpm 250gb hdd.

 

typical of the 5400.5 series. That is normal seek time for it unfortunately.

 

Thanks everyone for the advise. I finally scrounged up the cash for the 7200.3 GB 320GB HD and have migrated my original XP and recovery partition to it. Wow, big difference in response times for this new drive!! Love it and would recommend it to anyone needing extra storage. So far the battery drain is minimal, noticing approx 5 to 10 minutes difference in total battery life compared to the original hard drive. I also bumped up the RAM while I had the unit open and now have the full 1.5GB.

Thanks again for everyone's advice on this forum, I now have a sweet AAO150 on my hands...

Now my only issue is trying to figure out how to bring the OSX partition over. I may just have to reinstall it from scratch, but now that I got everything working on the OSX side, I don't want to disturb it. Any advice anyone?

Thanks!