Couple of G73JH questions.

I'm currently on the upgrade path for the G73JH listed in my sig. The biggest problem area for me right now is the slowpoke 5400 RPM hard drive and that is definitely gonna go first. I'm contemplating either a small (~120GB) SSD or the Seagate Momentus XT 750GB solid state hybrid. Now, I know that the G73JH's Intel HM55 Chipset only supports SATA II not SATA III like the later G73SW and G74SX. What I'm really wondering is, would there be a real, noticeable reduction in speed running a SATA III SSD or Momentus XT on a SATA II port? Would a very fast SSD saturate the SATA II port? What about the Momentus XT? I'm especially concerned when I see that the sequential read speeds on SATA III SSDs are halved when running on a SATA II port.

Secondly, the G73JH can support up to 16GB of RAM right?

 

I think the best choice for you is seagate momentus XT , because it uses sata II interface. sata III ssd,, will be bottlenecked by sata II ,

Yes you can upgrade your ram to 16gb.

 

Why'd you put a 5400 RPM drive in there?

As far as memory, there's really no need to have more than 4-6GB of RAM right now. I'd say to upgrade the screen and add a blu-ray drive if you don't have one.

 

If your a gamer then its better to stick with current screen, more than 8GB is useless for gaming.

 

I didn't put the 5400 RPM hard drive in there; mine's is the Best Buy model G73JH and it came with it. I bought the laptop dirt cheap with the intention of upgrading the lower-end components. I already know that my current amount of RAM is adequate for gaming but I use Autodesk Maya and I definitely need more RAM. My system freezes sometimes when rendering in Mental Ray because I don't have enough RAM.

I'm not gonna bother with upgrading the screen or a Blu-ray drive because I'm want to be able to play games fluently at my native resolution and I already have a Blu-ray player hooked up to my HDTV.

 

I always thought that once the hard drives gets big enough, the difference between 7200 and 5400 isn't that much. Is that true? I'm sure the ssd will definitely give a boost though.

 

Are you sure about that? I got the Best Buy model as well and it's a 7400 RPM drive. The only difference in hard drives between ASUS bought and Best Buy bought is just the number of drives.

Also, I use 3DS Max. It's not really RAM that you need, it's CPU power for rendering. Or maybe you're rendering with some god awful amounts of polys and I'm jumping to conclusions.

 

I'm sure about my hard drive speed and I've verified it in the device manager already. There were 2 Best Buy G73JH models, the RBBX05 with the i7-720QM and 7200 RPM HDD and the BST7 refresh with the i7-740QM and 5400 RPM HDD.

Obviouly a CPU upgrade would give me the most significant increase in rendering speed, but RAM is much easier and so cheap to upgrade at the moment. There have been instances where I've completely maxed out my 6GB with multiple instances of Maya running at the same time and some other applications open in the background and my system slows to a crawl or freezes as it starts swapping out of the page file. If anything, 12GB or 16GB would at least give me some multitasking headroom.

 

I can only speak to my personal experience, and I haven't bothered going the route of full SSD because I hoard tons of stuff.

I'm running the 500GB Momentus XT Hybrid drive, and the performance boost over the 5400RPM default drive that the Best Buy model came with is huge. Reboot time (Windows up to Windows up) on the hybrid drive is about 55 seconds. Reboot time with the 5400 RPM drive is EASILY 1.5 to 2x as long. The hybrid drive also does amazingly well with data that's accessed repetitively.

I could not live with an SSD just due to requiring the storage space, but I can say the performance of the Momentus XT is very good. One thing you definitely want to do though is make sure you are running the latest/most up to date Momentus XT firmware available from Seagate, because I know pre-SD28 firmware either had corruption issues or did not make use of the hybrid SSD portion of the disk.

Good luck whichever road you choose.

 

I am normally against a momentus XT but in terms of SATA II it would be a much better option and if it was the newer XT which has 8GB of NAND then I would definetely take that over a 120GB SSD for bang for buck.

SATA III there is no question because 500+ mb/s seq reads on an SSD will laugh all over a hybrid drive.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys. Looks to like my best choice right now is the 2nd generation Momentus XT. I've been doing some research and it looks like the sequential read and write speeds of the Seagate are both around 100MB/s which , thankfully, will not saturate SATA II. While it's got nothing on the OCZ Vertex 3, it's still twice as fast in read and write as my 5400 RPM Momentus.

 

You might as well spring for a samsung 830 128GB SSD which would be the same price as the momentus xt. Then use your old hard drive as your second one for storage. The difference real world between Sata II and III is very minimal, the real advantage you will have with the SSD drive vs the Momentus will be boot and load times. Would you rather wait 1 minute for windows to boot or 20 seconds.

Look at the Crucial M4 as well, they are cheaper by $20 to the Samsungs.

 

Read the reviews. The 2nd-gen Momentus XT can boot up at near-SSD speeds. And it can be had for ~$120 right now. A 128GB SSD has only enough storage to be used as a boot drive and maybe hold a few applications or games. There's no way I'm gonna run any of my games or applications on a 5400 RPM drive that averages around 40Mb/s sequential read and write speeds. Trust me it's a nightmare sometimes. I don't have enough funds at the moment to spring for both an SSD boot drive and a 7200 RPM storage drive so the Momentus XT is a good compromise.

 

The 500gb Momentus XT is still first gen. You have to buy the 750gb model to get 2nd gen.

 

I understand that. I wasn't talking about the 1st-gen Momentus XT. The prices of the second generation XT's have dropped in the last few months and it's not too hard to find them for the same price as the older generation ones now.

 

As a first gen Momentus XT user, I think you'd be pleased even with first gen compared to the original 5400 RPM drive the G73JH came with. My tests were 55 seconds for full reboot, so probably closer to 20-30 seconds power on to fully booted. I know SSD will be a bit faster, but not by enough to really matter to me.

I'm going to have to look into those new 2nd gen 750GB drives... I may have to pick up a couple as $170 each is a steal.

 

They were $125 with free shipping at Newegg on Wednesday with a promo code.

 

$125 for the 750gb is a great deal, they are listed at $179 on amazon. I just had back luck with that model. I had to return two that both developed a clicking and chirping sound and failed the seagate diagnostic test. I'm sure that does not happen too often but check it out before you load everything you have on it first.