1TB Aftermarket Drive for M17x

Hey all, enjoying your summer?

I got my R4 with the standard 500GB drive assuming I would upgrade later, and that later is now. However I can't seem to find any good 2.5" 1TB 7200rpm drives in the market for a reasonable price, and anything I see is over $200. Seeing as these drives are such a rarity, I thought I'd post here to see if any of you have actually made this upgrade, and if so, what drives you've purchased?

Also, any visible perks upon getting 7200RPM over 5400RPM and SATA III over SATA II when a mechanical hard drive is in question? The drive is going to be used for games and general storage.

 

Are there any 1TB 7200rpm drives?

As for the 1TB 5400rpm drives, SATA II vs SATA III doesn't matter. I've got a Samsung (now Seagate) M8 1TB and a WD Scorpio Blue 1TB.

The Samsung likes to load and unload the drive heads a lot, but it's quiet. The WD for some reason keeps on making clunk sounds so it's now sitting in a USB case. I've just purchased a Hitachi 2.5" 1TB 9.5mm drive to try next but have not received it yet.

In terms of speed, the three are probably about the same.

 

Apparently the laptop comes with 7200rpms 1TB drives if you pick that option. They also do exist otherwise (and aren't imported by aliens) lol. Anyway I suppose there's no real noticeable difference between these options. I'm thinking of going for the Momentus 1TB, what gives? Thanks for your reply though - I was considering the Scorpio Blue but the clunking you mentioned makes it a no-go. As for Hitachi, my M17x came with a 500GB Hitachi that works like a champ, and I love it so far seeing as I've had really bad experiences/luck with hard drives over the years..

 

I can't find a 1TB 7200 drive on newegg or amazon.

 

We have available at DELL only 750GB 7200RPM HDD's, the 1TB are 5400 RPM, if you need any pricing info please send us an e-mail to [email protected]

 

how about just adding an SSD instead? with the speed and performance, this is the MOST noticeable upgrade you could add to your R4

run windows/games on the SSD and storage on the HDD

 

the 750gb 7200rpm drives are fairly resonable if you can give up that extra 250gb of space. also, how much do you use your dvd/bluray drive. could always put another 750gb drive in there all for about the price of the 1tb drive you were looking at.

edit: just browsing around, i only saw one 7200rpm 2.5 1tb drive and it was 15mm. that may not fit.

 

Newegg.com - Seagate Constellation.2 ST91000640NS 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache 2.5" SATA 6.0Gb/s Enterprise-class Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

its 15mm though

 

The Samsung Spinpoint M8 HN-M101MBB and Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT are both 5400 RPM. Yes the WD10JPVT does make a bit of a clunking sound. I installed one in my friend's R3 a while back and other than the clunking he says it works great.

There aren't a whole lot of options out there for 1TB notebook drives because of the 2.5" form factor constraints vs the necessary platter size and number make it difficult to engineer a drive that size. The first known consumer 2.5" 1TB drive was 12.5mm tall (as opposed to the standard 9.5mm) so it could add the additional platter to make it 1TB. That drive (WD10TPVT) I had for my XPS M1710 and boy was it a crock of you-know-what. But that was over two years ago. I'd like to think the 1TB notebook drives have gotten better and guaranteed, they will. It might take another year or two before you/we see a 1TB 7200 RPM notebook drive for a reasonable price. Right now I'm gonna use 2 x 750GB WD Scorpio Blacks in RAID 0.

As far as SATA II vs SATA III speeds on an HDD go, it really doesn't matter since the speed of the data R/W lies with the RPMs. So it all depends on your preference. Do you really need the drive to be a 7200 RPM or if it is just for storage, can you live with 5400 RPM. Point of order, when your looking at the 1TB drives, make sure to check the height of the drive. The m17x's take the standard 2.5" x 9.5mm tall drives. Some...ok, just a few, of the 1TB drives out there are 12.5mm or 15mm tall. Those will not fit into either of the HDD slots on the notebook. I've heard of some engineering-minded people were able to modify their HDD slots to accomidate the taller drives, but I don't know what they had to do or how successful they were.

 

Could that be referring to a RAID0 array of 2x500GB drives?

 

Yes .