L2000 HD Heat Comparison

So I had the Toshiba 60GB hard drive come with my L2000, and temps via Mobile Meter after about 45 minutes of web browsing would go to 50-52oC. I just got my Hitachi 5K100 60GB hard drive today and set everything up. Now this one goes from 44-46oC...so about a ~5oC drop. It was about what I was expecting, but I was hoping for it to be cooler. I've read that the Seagate's might run even cooler, but I'm not sure if the person was referring to a 4200 or 5400 rpm drive...and I think I want the 5400 rpm drive. Seagate is supposed to come out with their lower wattage HD (5400.3), but it doesn't look like it'll come out for a while. Hope this helps some people out

 

thank you .

this information might help people that are having problems with heat in their computer. no doubt that the turion runs a bit warmer than the p-m's, but alot of heat also comes from the HD's in this case

 

No problem. I just noticed a new HD coming this August by Hitachi as well. It's the 4K120. It looks pretty amazing (although it's only 4200 rpm) because of it's power usage. It only uses 1.7W for seek and 1.4W for read/write. That's about 44% less power consumption than the Toshiba drive I had and 30% less than the 5K100.

So if you're willing to sacrifice some performance for less heat, this is definately the drive to get. In fact, I might even make the sacrifice in performance for it...no word on pricing yet though. Here's a link:

http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/menuitem.eac50d36f156eb8e2c1583c2eac4f0a0/

 

I want one of these:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/7k100/7k100.htm
but the power requirements are higher than that 4200RPM drive. 2.3W seek, 2W read/write (vs. 2.6/2.5 for the prior generation 7k60 I currently have). Make sure you get a HTS7210-series ATA drive (there's a SATA version and a lot of mislabled 5400RPM "7K100" drives) if you go hunting for one of these. It doesn't look like anyone actually has them in stock. I did find a listing on ZipZoomFly for the 80GB and 60GB versions.

 

i dont know much about HDs but i just want to ask or confirm this to anyone. .

should that higher capacity (120GB) 4200RPM drive be as fast as some lower capacity 5400RPM (ex. 60GB) drive since it has more density?

 

That's a big negative on that, hard drive speeds are independent of drive size. The 5400 RPM will go faster regardless of density with faster access speeds compared to a 4200 RPM. You'll want to get faster drive access speeds. I'd suggest at 5400 RPM at least.

 

I'm interested in this model (as well as Compaq v2000z). Both are Turion and looks quite good.
I experienced the heat from left wrist area on the demo unit at local stores... quite hot to be exact.
Anyone try using the notebook cooler pad? Would it help reduce heat at that area? I can't stand typing with that much heat.

http://www.targus.com/us/product_details.asp?sku=PA248U

Maybe, is it possible to drill some air vent on the HD cover itself?

 

The best thing you do if you get a Samsung HD is to swap in a Hitachi or Seagate drive and dump the Samsung on eBay. It gives you a good excuse to do a clean WinXP install without all the gunk HP bundles.

I checked the demo L2000 machine at my local CompUSA and it was cool, even while playing streaming video from a Slingbox over wireless. It doesn't matter what CPU you have when you have a Samsung heater in that cramped thin-and-light case.

 

Make that Samsung AND Toshiba (which is what I had). I think Seagate's will probably run the coolest and quietest between that and Hitachi. I just have a personal preference for Hitachi which is why I chose that brand.

 

And also the fujitsu that came with mine 40GB 4200RPM it was 52-56c (even went to 60+once) with 256mb ram on my notebook. With 512MB ram the temp is still warm at 49-51c.

For a 4200 drive i would expected it to be cooler

 

The slower drives have to work harder to keep up with the transfers (if you do a lot), plus with the lower amount of memory, it forces the HDD to work even harder because it uses the HDD as virtual memory and therefore has a lot of swapping. Upgrading the memory will help as Neero indicated above.

For drives that run cool, I like the Hitachi 60GB 5400rpm drive that I got in my nx8220. This drive run at approx 30-40c in idle and active states. The original drive I had with my original nx8220 was a Fujitsu. It was much more quiet, but ran a bit warmer by a few degrees. I'd recommend the Hitachi drives for a cooler running unit.

-Vb-

 

Thanks for a great post Venombite.

I think this is very important, also remember that as much as 128 megs of the memory is going straight to video and is not usable by the system. So 512 becomes 384. With Windows XP that isnt alot of memory. I think you will see a good decrease in heat generation with an increase in RAM.

Of course like Venom said a cool running HD like the hitachi will help alot as well.