Changned my XPS 1530's Samsung 320GB to the Seagate 320GB 3G

Picked up the 320GB 3G version at buy.com, swapped it out today used seagates cloner tool,
ran the test, cloned it, changed drive, rebooted, retested with new drive, let windows do a reboot ( for the drive hardware change)
retested.

 

So far the seagate is a little 'clickier' than the samsung, sounds like a quiet version of my WD 10K raptor. Vista disk index went from 5.4 to 5.9.

 

I probably got the same hardrive (Seagate Momentus 320GB 7200rpm Freefall Sensor - ST9320421ASG), and my laptop came with a WD Scorpio 250GB 5400rpm harddrive. I notice the Seagate being louder too, sounds like feet shuffling everytime it seeks something, but I just got used to it. This is my first Seagate (I always owned WD in the past) so at first the noise it made was unusual to me. I had a Fujitsu drive click on me from time to time and the Seagate doesn't sound like clicking, it sounds more like shuffling. My vista disk index also went to 5.9. Benchmarking shows it almost doubling in read/write vs. the 5400 WD, but the access time is a bit slower.

 

I can't believe how much these drives have dropped in price. I bought my WD 320GB 7200 for $159 about a month ago and now I see them for like $98. I have never seen hardware drop that fast. It sucks because my laptop took so long to be delivered it was just sitting on my desk most of that time anyway. Now you can get the Samsung 500GB 7200 for about $180.

 

I have the 9160823AS (160 GB 7200 RPM), which replaced my original Hitachi, which was a clicker. This one is always silent, even when in use (unless it's my M133O fan that's masking its noise :-( ), and my Seagate does not click.

 

its amazing how much the prices are dropping, i just need to find the smaller drive for my vaio tr2a now somewhere, wish these would fit.

yeah this one clicks a lot, i tried setting the acoustic thing in notebook hardware, dell edition, but no dice, trying the bios setting next, changed it to performance mode, its just booting up, no clicking yet, it just has the louder seek.

seems more responsive though, when i get 5 minutes i'll do a few apps comparisons as i can just swap the drives, but i mostly use developer studio which is vey hard disk speed dependant.

it also helped for when my laptops idling next to me, to turn off a lot of the annoying services that constantly hammer the disk/registry, i disabled ipod service, apoint, itype, ipoint, googleupdater, wmp services, search indexex, etc. i don't really use any of them that i need them to be running constantly. Never understood the need for services to periodically run things instead of using the scheduler, or the need to check a registry setting every second (or more)

 

oh well, my 7200 RPM Seagate just kicked the bucket, laptop was on overnite, had rebooted for a windows update and was stuck on a press F1 to contine warning screen, said no media, shut down restarted and the drive was in click death, laptop was reasonably hot even though the drive itself had shut down, i'm not sure if the power/fan control remains active at that F1 screen or not.

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blergh looks like a head crash, one of the platters has a large strip of the surface removed.

 

dam, never seen an exposed hd working, cool