200GB Seagate ST9200420AS on dv9000

Hi, I'm new to these forums, so i first just wanted to say hello to everyone here


I'm having some trouble with my new laptop hdd, and this looks like a good place to get some help. I tried doing a search on the topic first, but I haven't been able to come up with much. Sorry if this has been answered before though.

I recently bought a 200GB 7200 RPM Seagate Momentus to use as a secondary hard drive in my dv9000 (which I picked up in early 07 and is running XPSP2). The drive was OEM- no drivers or anything. I installed it (after ordering another sata adapter/caddy) but it doesn't seem to be recognized as a usable drive in Windows.

it IS visible in the device manager, and it reports as if everything is working fine. I've tried disable/re-enabling it, updating the drivers (it can't find any more suitable drivers online), and rolling back (no old drivers), and I can't seem to get it to come up as an accessable drive.

I also tried using my windows xp disk to format it that way, but the xp installer keeps reporting that there are no valid disks to format (which is weird because my primary drive is working fine). I even tried connecting it externally with a USB enclosure both on my dv9000t and in a different windows PC, and in both cases it showed up in the device manager, but not in "my computer".

Has anyone had a similar experience with this drive in a dv9000? I haven't read anything about this drive specifically but I read that sometimes SATA 3.0gb/s drives are not backward compatible with boards that are made for 1.5gb/s drives and need driver updates. I also read sometihng about drives over a certain size not being compatible? Any information would be appreciated. I'd like to get some further information so I can figure out if the drive is just bad, or it's just not expected to be compatible with this laptop.

Thanks!

 

Right click on "My Computer" and select Manage, and then go into Disk Management. You should be able to see the drive in there, and from within XP/Vista you can format it and give it a hard drive letter.

The XP disc cannot see either drive because the disc does not have native drivers for SATA hardware.

Since you can see the drive in the Device Manager, it will probably work....though at SATA150 speeds...once you format it.

Good luck, and let us know what you see when you try this.

 

Greg to the rescue! Thank you so much, I was starting to get discouraged. So, are you confirming then that I wont' get SATA300 speeds with the dv9000 motherboard, or was that just a guess?

Thanks again!

 

Confirmed. SATA150 speeds only.

But guess what...no hard drive can transfer faster than SATA150 anyway, so it doesn't matter. At least no laptop hard drive surpasses SATA150 speeds (a few desktop ones do though).

 

that's interesting... where is the bottleneck, read/write speeds?

 

The bottleneck is the physical speed of the drive itself. The basic definition of a hard drive is the bottleneck.

A physical disk can only rotate so fast, and a micro-arm can only move so quickly, to get to your data. Thus the speed limit.

 

interesting... looks like I was taken by marketing on this one. Oh well, the extra 200gb, 7200rpm, and 16mb cache should serve me well for now anyway.

I'm off to bed, but thanks for the help and info.

 

Hope its working for you!

 

Im looking to upgrade to this model aswell.. except ST9200420AS(G) with the G-shock protection.

Can you do a mini personal review/benchmarks if possible?

 

I wish I went with the Seagate 7200 drive instead of the Hitachi... Oh well! Please give us a review when you successfully install it! There are hardly any reviews online (but the few I found are all 100% positive). I'd be interested in your experience.

And Greg is the man here on this board... flipfire too... these guys are all over the place! Very greatful for their contributions.