Laptop upgrades: 5400rpm hard drive in an Inspiron

[Glocksman]

I recently upgraded my Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop with a Seagate Momentus ST94811A 40 GB hard disk.

Specs:

Capacity: 40 GB
Speed: 5400 rpm
Cache: 8 MB
Seek time: 12 ms avg
Interface: Ultra ATA/100


The drive I replaced was a Hitachi IC25N030ATCS04 Travelstar 30 GB disk.

Specs:

Capacity: 30 GB
Speed: 4200 RPM
Cache: 2 MB
Seek Time: 12.0 ms avg
Interface: ATA-5


Testing platform specs:

Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop w/15 inch screen
Processor: Pentium 4 (Northwood) 2.5GHz 400 FSB (upgraded from a Celeron 2 Ghz)
Chipset: Intel 845GL
BIOS: Dell A32
RAM: 512 MB
OS: Win XP Professional SP2. NTFS file system.
Testing software: SiSoft Sandra 2004 build 10.9.113


Testing procedure:

Before running the Sandra benchmark, I defragmented each drive in order to both warm it up to full operating temperature and to optimize the disk. I then ran the benchmark twice on each drive to see if the results repeated themselves. They did.

Also, both drives had roughly 10 GB of space used and had pretty much (there were some additional small apps installed on the Seagate) the same contents.

Results:

First up, the Hitachi IC25N030ATCS04.
Screencap of Hitachi Travelstar test results

Speed: 18 MB/s.
Temperature at end of tests: 109°F
Not bad, and comparable to other 4200 rpm drives.

Next up, the Seagate ST94811A.
Screencap of Seagate Momentus test results

Speed: 28 MB/s
Temperature at end of tests: 113°F

I suspected the Seagate would outperform the Hitachi because of the increased cache and platter speed, but I didn't think it'd be by this much.
Conclusion: the Momentus is a substantial upgrade from a stock 4200 rpm drive.


Oh yeah, I have some parts left over from my upgrades.
Namely the Celeron 2 Ghz and two Infineon 128MB PC2100 SODIMM's

The Celeron is a desktop processor despite coming out of a laptop.
The sSpec is SL6RV

It can be yours for $35 shipped USPS Priority Mail.
The SODIMM's can be yours for $15 shipped each or $25 for the pair.
Buy all three pieces and get them for $55 shipped.

PM me if interested.

[Glocksman]

Conclusion: the Momentus is a substantial upgrade from a stock 4200 rpm drive.

And in other news, the sky is, infact, blue.

Maybe it's obvious to you, but I didn't expect it to be that much faster. I figured on a 5 MB/s gain, if that. The reason I ran the test to begin with was I noticed that it cut 15 seconds off of my windows boot time and got curious as to how much faster it was.

Sorry if I bored you with this post.

[White Haven]

Get a 7200 rpm laptop drive, and test that against your old 4200. Thaaat'll be fun Having seen the difference between a standard 7200 SATA drive and a 10k Raptor drive, I can readily envision what you're looking at. Then again, I'm a retail tech

[Glocksman]

I thought about a 7200 Hitachi, but the heat concerns scared me off.

A guy on the Ars forums said he fried two of them in his laptop after they overheated. That and Seagate's 3 year warranty convinced me to pick out the Momentus over the Hitachi, Toshiba, and Fujitsu fast drives.

[phongn]

David's useless spam has been removed

I'm a bit surprised that some people's 7K laptop drives have been cooking on them. I heard fairly favorable heat and power consumption levels off of Ars before.

[Faram]

My IBM Thinkpad is on 24/7 with a 7200rpm disk no issues so far, and it's a really old one too.

[phongn]

The key word there is "IBM"

Glock might be having trouble since he's already using a rather hot CPU for his laptop

[Glocksman]

The machine does get kinda warm, but no heat issues cropped up when i ran Sandra's burn in module for an hour.

Highest CPU temp reached was 150F (64C), which is a little hotter than I'm used to seeing but still within Intel's spec.

The Ars poster said his opinion on the 7200 drive failure was that the heat buildup was caused by insufficient ventilation due to the design of the laptop.

I'm not surprised that a ThinkPad has adequate ventilation for fast drives.
I just didn't want to take the chance with my cheap Dell.