G73JH 2nd Hard Drive buying help

Hey I've had a G73JH laptop for almost a year now and I've decided to buy a 2nd hard drive. I've already read the stickies and done research on having to buy another caddy and such. Before I begin on the great search of hard drives and figuring out what kind work or don't work I've decided to ask you guys on what kind of hard drives you got for your laptops and how they are working for you.

My personal price range is 60-100$ and any deals or sales you came across while searching for your hard drives would be most appreciated. As for size of hard drive I'm probably going to get a 500gb, but as I said if I could find a larger size for a good price I wouldn't mind going higher. If you have any info or words of wisdom of higher price or larger hard drives then please share as they will most certainly help any others who are also looking to purchase a hard drive.

 

Newegg.com - OCZ Vertex Plus OCZSSD2-1VTXPL60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

Two questions and possible suggestions:

1) Whats the size of your current HDD and because of that how much more of a capacity are you looking for?

If you need a lot a regular 7200rpm HDD is what you need.

Any brand like Western Digital Black or Seagate momentous should do.


2) Do you want super speed and low latencies?

SSD is the way to go. Provided you have large regular HDD already. Just make that as your storage and shift all your main applications and OS to the SSD. 120GB should be fine. Is going to cost more than 150USD, but the speed difference is well worth the price.

 

SSD is the way I started a thread about this here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/601886-g73jh-ssd-newb.html

To be honest if you already have a 7200RPM with enough space then you only really need 40GB to run the OS system on the Primary mine has only used 30GB tops. However, it does help with games and software to run them from the SSD as well to speed everything up. I personally found my 96GB kingston so good for the price I decided to bin my failing HDD and pick up another giving me 192GB of SSD for only £150. Just delete what you dont need and an SSD is plenty.

 

If you want an ssd i would go with SAMSUNG 470 Series MZ-5PA064B/AM 2.5" 64GB SATA II $99.99.

If you're not interested in ssds, and more looking for mechanical hdds, my personal preference is hitachi, but WD is also good, specially the Black Scorpios are probably the fastest mechanical 2.5 drives,

Hitachi Travelstar 2.5 Inch 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA II 16 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02858 $61
Western Digital WD Scorpio Black 500 GB SATA II 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM 2.5 Inch Mobile Hard drive - WD5000BPKT $66

Now if you are looking for pure storage, the new samsung m8 are getting great reviews,
Samsung SpinPoint SATA 5400rpm 8 MB Cache 1 TB 2.5-Inch Hard Drive (M8 HN-M101MBB) $90
SAMSUNG Spinpoint M8 HN-M101MBB 1TB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive $90

Personally i would like the combo of Samsung 470 (OS n Apps) + Samsung M8 (storage).

 

For a 7200RPM drive, Hitachi 7K750, fast and quiet, oh and it's usually around $70-80 too: Newegg.com - HITACHI Travelstar 7K750 HTS727575A9E364 (0J12283) 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

A SSD is kinda out of your price range and if you do decide to get one, avoid the vertex. Well, you could say avoid Sandforce controllers until they fix the random BSOD problems they've been having for a while now.

 

I actually went with a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB hybrid drive. My system had a 640GB 5400 RPM drive when new, but I wanted both storage AND decent performance. The Hybrid drive while not giving me full SSD level performance, pushed my usable storage to over 1TB which is great for people like me who use their laptop as their main system.

I may at some point invest in a SSD for my system drive, but I'd have to buy a disk caddy for my optical drive bay so that I can have the best of all worlds.

 

Well, since you have two drive bays and the G73 fits even fat 2.5mm drives, you could get a SSD and a 1TB to keep the optical and buy enclosures for the other drives you replaced.

 

True, that's a possibility... I personally find myself NEVER using the optical drive, so I might just do away with it at some point... Only time it gets used is for reinstalling windows, and even that can be done off a thumbdrive if I set it up right.

I saw the post where someone setup 2 1TB drives and a boot SSD. That's a pretty sick setup, although I don't like the fact that all 1TB options I've seen are 5400 RPM. Basically you are limited to whatever you can fit on the SSD if you want disk performance and all other disk is just storage.

I suppose if I had a 160GB SSD that would be enough space, but I like having a decent capacity high speed spindle drive for things that don't need SSD performance, but I still want performance from.

The thought of having 2TB of storage plus an SSD makes me happy in the pants though...

 

2x mid range SSD FTW.

I found myself using 500gb to store crap I only thought I needed. By deleting what I dont need and keeping things nice and clean and tidy 200gb of SSD is plenty and when you have a lot of storage it really does slow down on a mechanical drive.

Not to mention the most important reason to buy an SSD. When you punch the laptop it does not damage the drive like it does with a mechanical drive and you all know what im talking about. Tried and proven.

 

Ha!

When you punch the laptop! I know EXACTLY what you're talking about.

I had random lockups that I finally got to the bottom of... One of my bottom RAM sticks was screwy, and I pulled both out and knocked them around on my table because I had read of cases where RAM can have a loose connection or something, and it fixed my lockups. Prior to that, just slapping the bottom of the laptop would temporarily fix my lockups.

Between that and my screwy touchpad, this thing has seen its fair share of beatings. Thankfully, I've fully resolved both issues.

I will say though that my Seagate Momentus XT performs really well compared to the original 640GB 5400 RPM drive, and going to an SSD would really be an unneeded performance boost for me.

I accept that there'd be a performance increase with an SSD, but until I find a couple hundred dollars laying around, I'm pretty happy with what I have.

I agree with you on keeping a system clean and running well, but I have Torrentleech and What.cd accounts which keeps me filling my drives no matter how much space I have.

More info on the RAM issue... I'd have random BSODs and hard locks where as soon as it'd lock up once, on reboot the system would lock up again within a couple of minutes. After beating on the bottom of the laptop, the vibrations would resolve the issue and things would run fine for hours/days. I'd then get another hard lock or BSOD and the issue would happen all over again. Most of the time my hard locks happened overnight, so I'd get up in the morning to an unresponsive system.

It's been at least a week or so since I slapped my RAM sticks around, and they've been running good since (including running MEMTest clean for several hours).

At the end of the day though, I have a laptop with a pretty great ATI Radeon 5870 that can run 99% of games at high settings, that will do double duty as a work machine that makes my coworkers jealous.

Until a substantial upgrade comes around, I'll be very happy to keep this system. I could see a 1080p screen upgrade in my future and some larger RAM sticks, but overall this system has been amazing for the cost.

 

Agreed on the 5870M this bad boy is lasting me till Wimbledon I love it, and if you stick with 900p it will last you longer 1080p does struggle on some games.

They are quite expensive at the end of the day I was happy with a 230mb/s read 170mb/s write but cutting the price down from the same SATA III by £50 after all our JH cant handle SATA III so thought why not. This allowed me to get two mid range SSD's for only £150 around $250 for you. The difference in performance is so noticeable its worth every penny and means I dont need to upgrade now for at least mid 2012.

 

Caddy?

I just stuck a regular #2 pencil behind the HDD, it's been there over a year now.

 

Just throwin this out there for you. Love this drive i have it in my G73jh as my main drive. Works great for the price.

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Momentus-7200RPM-Hybrid-ST95005620AS-Bare/dp/B003NSBF32

 

Sorry for being silent for so long, was having trouble connecting to site. Thanks for the advice, was not expecting the thread to have so much activity. The links were very helpful and I'm sure they will help anyone else browsing this thread. Keep up any news for good and bad hard drives so that all the other newbies will know.

Now for me personally I was looking for a pure storage hard drive and had my eyes set on this (before it went out of stock).
Newegg.com - Open Box: Seagate Momentus ST9750420AS 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Now I'm looking at Newegg.com - SAMSUNG Spinpoint M8 HN-M750MBB 750GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive or I'll just wait for the other hard drive to come back in stock. If I come across any deals/sales I'll post them, in the meantime keep up the good work guys you are really helping.