Asus Z71v - Sata 7200rpm 80 Gb?

Greets all,

I read these forums a lot before purchasing my Z71V laptop, so let me start off by saying that the community here is simply fantastic. Having purchased my laptop, I must say that I am very, very pleased with both the price and the performance - it's truly a powerhouse. That being said, when I built that computer I only put in a 5200RPM Seagate hard drive, because the place that I bought the barebook from said that only capacities of 40GB were supported at 7200RPM, and I felt I needed more space. However, I have looked other places since buying the laptop, and they have claimed that up to 60GB are supported at 7200RPM. To push it one step further, I have no idea what the capacities supported are for SATA, which is the kind of drive I'd like to purchase. To round all of this off, does it really matter? Do notebooks, unlike desktops, really only support certain capacities at certain RPM's / interface types, or was that simply what was the highest available at the time when the description was written? I am looking into using the Seagate ST980825AS, which is a 80GB 7200RPM SATA hard drive, and I was hoping that someone would be able to give me the "yay" or "nay" on if that would work, and, if not, what's the largest hard drive I could use at 7200RPM (SATA or PATA), and any suggested drive manufacturers out there that make such a drive.

Just to give a bit of background in closing, the reason I am looking at upgrading the hard drive is because during some games, such as Unreal Tournament 2004, the game runs fine most of the time, however when I do a lot of running through levels the game will skip / stutter. It's not a graphics card issue, because the frame rate isn't really affected, it's more like a 1 second pause in the game. I have noticed that this only happens when the "HD LED" lights up, so I can only assume that the 5400RPM PATA hard drive is having a hard time keeping up with the game. Any advice on this matter as well would be appreciated (Using XtremeG drivers at 300/500 clock speed on the GPU, btw).

Well, thanks for reading this long post, hope that I can get some answers, and once again, thanks a lot to everyone out there, you guys have helped me out tremendously already!

-Rofecture

EDIT: Changed the title of this thread as an update to the way it seems to be going (later posts are changing more to general gaming performance than hard drive support discussion).

 

Segate's 60/80/100gb 7200rpm sATA drives should be released in early August, however ETA's have slipped through the spring and summer.

 

Have you tried speedisking (and placing your unreal games at the beggining of the hard drive - i.e. outside of the hard drive track?) or even defragging your hard drive? A second pause is a LONG time and there shouldn't be that much of a bottle neck from the hard drive. How much RAM do you have (if it's less than 1gb, you may want to consider upgrading)? Maybe you're computer is paging too much.

I'm thinking the amount of money you'd spend to upgrade from 5400rpm to 7200rpm (not to mention new heat and noise issues) would be better spent upgrading to 2gb of RAM and then completly disabling paging in windows and doing the reg hack to force kernal information to all be stored in memory.

P.S. TODAY I GET MY Z71V!! Sometime within 1-3 hours!! I can't wait! I'll play UT2004 and let you know if I have the same prob (I have a seagate 100gb 5400rpm PATA drive with 8mb cache)

 

Reason for hitachis 7200rpm shortage? Quality control issues i belive.

 

Thanks for the replies so far. Does that mean that I would be able to run the 7200RPM 80GB on my Z71V? No one really came out and said either way .

Also, yes, I do already have 1 GB of RAM. I don't know anything about speedisking, but I ran UT2K4 on my desktop just fine without it, so why would I need it for my laptop now? If you think that upgrading to 7200RPM is the way to go, then I'll just do that...even if it costs a bit more.

From what I gathered, you think that perhaps the problem is Windows placing the level into the pagefile...I suppose that could be the problem. And as for the 1 second pause I metnioned, that was an overexaggeration...I'm not sure exactly how long it is, I just wanted to get accross the point that it wasn't so much as series of "stutters" (which would point to a GPU problem), but rather just a quick pause in gameplay every now and then as if it is trying to load something but can't quite keep up.

EDIT: And if you would be so kind as to play UT2k4 and post your results here, since we seem to have very similar hard drives, that would be GREAT!

 

Actually the reason for the shortage was two fold..... shortage of parts and they were gearing up for sATA...... Seagate will have all their's out shortly and Hitachi should follow soon after.

 

Well if your Z71V support SATA HDD, it shouldn't be a problem at all.

If your Z71V came wiht regular PATA HDD, you can't use the new SATA drive.

But as far as I know, your Asus does not support SATA anyway. (I'm 99.9999% sure that your Asus only support PATA)

Unless someone comes out with PATA to SATA converter, you can't use SATA HDD in your system. (But I doubt if any one will produce one)

So the best bet for you is the Hitachi 60GB 7200RPM now. Seagate said they will also come out with PATA with 7200RPM so perhaps you want to wait to see if Seagate would be any better.

BTW, Hitachi came out 60GB 7200RPM before they came out with 40GB 720RPM. Kinda odd, isn't it??

Well the 7200RPM IS FASTER than 5400RPM, not to mention 4200RPM. You will feel that it is faster (but not quieter, cooler and less power hungry) much faster.

 

The z71v does support sATA doesn't it?

It's the z70v that doesn't.

 

That's right. And when I get my z71v (it should have been here by now... but I'll have it sometime this evening) I'll confirm if it has a SATA-PATA adapter, which I think it does.

 

My Z71V (built from barebook) DOES already have the SATA port (it comes with a system where you can either use the PATA or SATA adapter on the motherboard, and comes with both adapters). Thanks for the advice, all.

 

Well, I'm typing this on my brand new z71v I assembled myself . It's great! It looks A LOT better than I had thought it would! And I like that the screen doesn't lay on the keyboard (the M3 had that problem... it hovered like half a mm above the keyboard so the slightest movement and it would pick up grease/friction marks from the keyboard. The screen resolution is also awesome; I LOVE THIS SCREEN!

I'd like to eventually mod the heatsink on the GPU so the fan doesn't run as often or at all. I've also volt modded this down to 0.7v@800mhz and 1.18v@2GHz.

Anyway, so many good comments, but the reason i'm writing this is to answer your question regarding the performance in unreal. I was very impressed!! I played against my brother in multiplayer as the host while running prime95 in the background (for hte stability test of my volt mod) for a couple hours and I had it the graphics set to max everything at 1680x1050 and I did NOT experience a single hitch. It ran all smoothly for the whole 2 hours. So like I said, I don't think it's your hard drive that is the problem, unless it's failing. The problem is likely an optimization problem. As for the potential for SATA this laptop comes with the adapter and should be fully compatible with any 2.5" SATA drive. :asus:

 

Well, glad to hear that I won't need to upgrade my hard drive to fix this problem. Still, though, that raises some interesting questions...why the heck is mine having skipping issues? I don't think the hard drive is failing, but this isn't only occuring in UT2K4, but also now in Halo (for PC) and Empire Earth II...very odd. Would you mind telling me a few things about your settings - what drivers are you using for the graphics card? And does anyone know of any programs out there that would allow me to test the stability of my hard drive? Or any other suggestions.

Thanks,

Rofecture

 

I installed the drivers from http://z71forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=3
As for testing your hard drive, you could use Centrino Hardware Control to check the SMART status of your hard drive. Also, make sure that Asus probe is not running - i found in my m3np that whenever it probed for information (i.e. temp) it would momentarily kill i/o (so my mouse, for a split second, would freeze and jerk).

Oh and the video driver i'm using is nvidia's latest with the inf mod. It's forceware 77.72. I also have the latest BIOS upgrade.

 

Man I can't wait until the SATA drives get release. Then I could use this Hitachi drive as an external backup system.

CDW.COM have listed the Seagate SATA one already. It is 253.00 for the 80GB SATA 7200RPM drive.

It wasl ike 359.00 for the 100GB SATA 7200RPM drive.

It said shipping 1-2 weeks. So not sure exactly what when is that.

 

They've released 77.76. I've heard it fixes a lot of bugs from 77.72. You could get it from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum

 

Okay, so I was beating my head against a wall over here trying to figure out what the deal is, then I started thinking about what you said about the ASUS PC Probe slowing your system down. I realized I have had Centrino HC running ever since I started up my PC, always running in the background. Turned it off, and the glitch has gone down significantly.

The other thing that seemed to help a lot was turning the Audio from H/W 3D to "Safe Mode" - I was just wondering if anyone know exactly how good the internal audio is on the Z71V...I'm planning on buying a Creative Audigy 2 Notebook anyways, but I was just wondering for reference - is the internal one even a separate hardware card, or is it just siphoning off the main CPU?

Other than that, things seem to be going well now...I think I'm averaging about 40 FPS on 1680 x 1050 with all settings on Med / High...looks great, performs well...well enough for me, at least .

Thanks again,

Rofecture

 

i think the new sonoma platform is suppose to have hardware audio, so i assume it's pretty good. The sound quality is a lot better than my former non-sonoma centrino. Of course, Creative is specialized in audio, so i'm sure their Sound Blaster product will do a lot better and sound better.

Glad to hear it's working better for you, although I'm sad to hear it hasn't completly alleviated the problem. There's gotta be something else doing it. As I said, it's perfectly smooth on my machine. As for the frame rate in unreal, how do you get it to tell you the FPS?

edit: I looked it up and found i can do it by typing STAT FPS into the console.