V1S Hard Drive Upgrade - Suggestions welcome

Hi, my V1S has a 200gb 4200 rpm hard drive. My V1S has XP Pro installed but still feels sluggish so I figured I might use it as an excuse to upgrade my hdd.

Thing is I want to be sure I get the right drive, will the drive in the link below be a good option?

http://www.pyramid.com/Product.aspx?StockCode=A41352

If not then any recommendations would be welcome and as i'm gonna change the hdd then I might as well invest in the best.

Thanks

 

take your hdd out and see if its a SATA. if it is than that seagate will work.

the new samsung 256GB is also very good. fast as some 7200RPM drives in performing certain tasks.

but if you want the best then the 200GB Seagate 7200 with 16mb cache seems to be it

 

Thanks for the reply. I am sure that the V1S is supplied with sata as standard.

Actually i've just remembered that I had to slipstream the sata drivers with XP to install it.

How would I transfer the information to the other. Will it work if I format the new drive and copy the entire contents of my existing drive over, would it boot up okay after installing the new drive?

Thanks again.

 

No it won't.

You've got to do a backup image either with "Windows Backup and Restore Center" or (even better) with some program like Acronis TrueImage.

Then you have to do a clean installation of Windows Vista (if you used "Windows Backup and Restore Center") or boot from Acronis Rescue Media and then restore the backup image.

If you use Acronis, then you could also connect your new drive external and use the tool "Clone hdd". This would be even faster.

 

you can get a free version of acronis from seagate website......but you are only legally allowed to use it if you own a seagate or maxtor hdd.............

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard

 

A good free alternative is PartImage. NTFS support is only experimental but usually it works well. (google is your friend)

By the way, sacrificing rotation speed for size to maintain the price makes sense for the manufacturer (most people will look first at GB and think 'what's that RPM thing anyway'). But putting a 4200RPM HDD in a Vista system hints a bit to sadism on the manufacturer's part...

 

I have just checked my hard drive using DiskSpeed02 and the results are

Max Speed 40664 kBytes/s
Min Speed 15811 kBytes/s
Avr Speed 39090 kBytes/s

Can anyone tell me if this is good or bad. Hopefully I can figure out why my V1S is so slow. During startup the hdd light is on constantly yet it still takes ages to boot up, it just seems the hard drive can't supply the data as quick as the laptop wants it - at least thats how it seems.

Thanks

 

actually. would you like to buy one of those hybrid HDD with the 250MB flash memory and do a review for us?

if you can find one to buy that is.

 

At the moment I need to get my machine running sweet. I am interested in the hybrid's but I think I would rather sort out my systems slow performance.

Thanks

 

4200RPM is certainly related to performance issues. I'm not sure to what extent but I think significant, because Vista does a lot of HDD access.

 

FWIW, my V1s-B1 has a hybrid drive. I don't have it with me now, but Vista popped up a message at some point asking me to enable a profile to allow it to use the hybrid drive. When I pulled up the props for the drive, it showed something like 384Mb of ram. I hadn't looked into the details of how to enable it at this point.

 

Are you sure that it wasn't about the shared video memory? (turbocache or whatever name it has)

384MB sounds a bit much for a HDD flash memory cache.

 

I thought it was a bit wierd too at first, but I might be a bit off on the amount. I thought it was 3 hundred something. Windows called it a hybrid drive too. I'll check it out tonite and verify things.

 

I suggest looking at the Hitachi 200GB 7200 RPM drive. I believe that it is faster than the Seagate, but do a search for reviews to see for yourself. I put this drive in my G1s and it is very nice and fast but did not seem to have much effect on heat or battery life.

As for moving to the new drive, take a look at Casper. It is a very simple, very cheap (or free for 30 days) drive clone utility that works well and quickly. You should get an external case for a 2.5" drive (either USB or eSATA) so you can connect your new drive to the system and do the disk clone.

Ira

 

If you like open-source, then use clonezilla-live. It backed up my G1S (including the hidden Fat32 recovery partition) and was able to restore it without any problems.

 

I need to ask as I haven't been able to find the right information.

What version of sata does the V1S support - I have seen a Fujitsu SataIII Drive offering incredible speeds but I bet the V1S is not compatable.

Anyway if anyone know for sure then please let us know.

Thanks

 

387Mb. I haven't spent the time figuring out how to get it working yet.

 

Maybe it's enabled by default.