E1705 and Disk Drives.. Absolutly SATA? Slow your Roll....

First, Hi to everyone. Love these forums.

Ive had an E1705 for about a month now and I love it. Plays all my games wonderfully, all software runs without a hitch. Hardware experienced 0 problems.

However....

I previously owned a Travelmate 4400 with a 5400RPM Disk Drive, and while the overall performance of the new Dell makes the 4400 look like a one legged man in an *** kicking contest, I couldnt understand why it felt as my Hard Drive performance was somewhat sub-par. I understand the SATA hype, and I understand that SATA vs IDE in real world applications is arbitrary. But I expected to notice at least similar performance, especially at the same spindle speed of 5400RPM. Then I read the fine print on the 1705.

60GB, 5400RPM 2mb cache.

2 MB CACHE!!!!!!!!

So I found the culprate. Yes, Drive Cache IMO makes a tremendous difference in Desktop performance, Im sure it at least that if not more in laptopdrives. So whats with the lack of memory??? I guess at the behest of cost, who knows.

So, off to newegg I go. Browsing for disk drives, and the only SATA drives i see are SATA150's Hmmmm....

Does anyone know if these are the only disk drives compatible with the E1705?? Im going to replace this 2MB Cache clunker, but Im not moving to 7200RPM because While the performance may be even better, the heat tradeoff just isnt worth it to me.

Im wanting to get 100 or 120gb. Just curious if anyone has any suggestions on compatibilty with the interface on this lappy with drives.

Thanks in Advance

 

Any SATA, be it SATA or SATAII will work. SATAII is backward compatable. It really matters not because no HD, even a Raptor is yet at the 150MB/s of SATA. Currently the primary advantage of SATAII is NCQ and OOE.

But I'm surprised your HD is only 2MB cache, what brand is it? I'll have to open my E1505 [when it arrives] and check.

Hermit

 

Hitachi. I was surprised myself. However, If you check the website, dell does specifiy the 60GB 5400RPM Hard drive is 2mb cache.

 

Yeah I love my E1705 as well, but the hard drive is definitely the bottleneck in the system. A dual hard drive with RAID option would make things interesting, but definitely more expensive, bulky and more heat issues among other things. SATA speeds aren't really utilized completely by most systems, the most I've had was about ~140 MB/s (burst speed) on my desktop; raptors running in RAID 0 but that's just a synthetic benchmark. Although this laptop's hard drive is faster than most others.

That's odd yours is 2MB, I guess Dell put in different hard drives in different machines because mine is a 60GB 5400rpm drive as well and it has a 8MB buffer. What's your hard drive model/model no. ?

 

Mine is a Hitachi too; Hitachi HTS541060G9SA00

 

Wow, I have what I would have assumed was the same HD, on the E1505 that I just received. 60GB SATA 5400RPM. I just checked the specs and its a Fujitsu MHV2060BH. According to the Fujitsu site it has a 8MB buffer.

 

It will be interesting to see what HD I get in my E1505. I went base: 40GB, 5400 rpm. I wasn't planning an upgrade, rather attaching a very large [400-500GB] swap disk via USB, FW or even SATA, for my large stitching projects.

Hermit

 

Since Dell builds over 1-Million lappies per month, I doubt they source from one vendor. Perhaps no one vendor could meet Dell's needs. The only single source they have is Intel.

Hermit

 

What about Toshiba ? I have that drive in my laptop.

 

Toshiba's HDs are junk - I had one in my Toshiba Satellite (obviously), and it literally blew up, which totally trashed my notebook's MOBO. I would think that Toshiba has made improvements to their drives in the last couple of years, but if you start to hear some loud clacking/clicking noises from your notebook's HD or notice anything out of the ordinary (severe slow-downs), yank it out and replace it!

 

My Toshiba HD experience has been very good. My original Dell lappie had a 30GB Toshiba, I replaced it with a 80GB, 16MB cache, 5400 RPM Toshiba, much faster. The 30GB Toshiba is still going strong in a PSD.

Hermit

 

Do you know how much cache has the Toshiba's hard drive MK6032 GSX ??

 

Looks like it is 8MB to me. I copied and pasted this off a German website:

Toshiba MK6032GSX 60GB Bulk SATA, 2.5'', 5400rpm, 8MB Cache, 2-5 Tage

Hope this helps.

 

Hurm... if its a hitachi, I'm pretty sure its gonna have an 8MB cache since I don't think Hitachi makes a 5400 RPM SATA drive without one. Dell often lists minimum spec for the hard drives it will put into systems. However that is non-vendor specific. You might get say... Fujitsu with a 2MB cache or a Toshiba with 16MB you never know what your gonna get from the Dell bin heh.