Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

I wanted to upgrade my E6400's hard disk. I found some good deals on WD drives but I noticed that there's a 34% difference in price between the BJKT (with free fall sensor) and BEVT (without free fall sensor).

I have a Hitachi 120 GB, 7200 RPM with free fall sensor but so far, I've not seen any real use to it. I'm very careful with my notebook but there's the occasional hard placement on a table from maybe a couple of centimetres. It's this type of event that the free fall sensor can't detect or react in time.

So my question is whether the free fall sensor is worth paying 34% more.

 

The BEVT looks to be the WD Scorpio Blue... 5400RPM, 8MB cache, etc. The BJKT looks to be the WD Scorpio Black... 7200RPM, 16MB cache, shock guard, etc. Different product families. I would pay more for a 7200RPM drive with bigger cache and shock guard provided it is comparably quiet and power efficient. I'd also look for fluid dynamic bearings... and no more than one platter if I did not need the extra capacity.

GK

 

Installed ok but left a version mismatch with the nVidia Desktop Manager (presumably installed by previous Dell download), so I uninstalled the Desktop Manager since I don't seem to need it.

GK

 

You're actually right. The cheaper drive is indeed a 5400 RPM drive. I hadn't read the specs carefully!

But WD does make 7200 RPM drives with and without free fall sensors. But reading all those codes isn't easy...

 

I had a similar problem with 185.85. I uninstalled all the Nvidia drivers and installed 185.85 that I'd downloaded from the site. There were no more problems.

 

I recommend to get it with free fall sensor, because you simply never know. The last thing you want is a corrupted HDD or a corrupted project, trust me. And it's just a few dollars more. Remember that in computers you always get what you paid for. Don't regret it, there is no magic recovery on corrupted data.

 

I would recommend looking at this if you want a new hard drive:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17010

 

I've just recently purchased this laptop and have noticed that when using it after it's been put to sleep causes it to freeze up when using the keyboard. Has anyone else experienced this or know what's the cause. BTW I'm running Windows 7.

 

haven't encountered that problem or any problems so far on sleeping and on suspend mode . i'm on win7 also

maybe it's your intel or dcp drivers....?

 

No issue here under Vista 64-bit and Win7 64-bit.
Remember that the OS is in beta, and that the drivers for Win7 are in beta, or so you used Vista drivers which is for the wrong OS, but like us, hope that it works properly. On my system, I saw no problem using Vista 64-bit drivers on Win7 64-bit.