Suggest me a new hard-drive for my HP dv9000 laptop - 9605 ea model

Hey guys, think the hard-drive on my dv9605ea laptop is failing. Can someone suggest me a reliable, value for money hard-drive? I'm looking at a minimum of 300 odd GB.

If it's any help, my original hard-drive seems to be from the Hitachi Travelstar 5K250 line.

Also, out of interest... as far as I understand most hard-drives come with a roughly 3 years warranty. Since my laptop is less than 2 yrs. old, is it likely the the hard-drive be covered by its manufacturer (Hitachi rather than HP)?

 

Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive
Available on newegg for $74.99 with free shipping.
You can also look for the Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200 RPM for $107.99
Also, Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB 5400rpm is about $89.99

 

Hey, I'm from the UK so prices are likely to be different. Thanks for the suggestions though I'll have a look at them.

Another think... the original drive was a 5400RPM one. With that in mind, is it likely to be OK to replace it with one that runs at 7200RPM? I was a little worried it might make the overheating problem on my laptop worse.

Edit: Should I also be looking at the physical dimension of the hard-drive i.e. length, width and height? Or, should any 2.5" ones should work fine?

Edit 2: Seems like the original hard drive only transferred at 1.5 Gb/s. How can I check if my laptop supports 3 GB/s transfer rates?

 

2.5” Form Factor is the standard and is what you need. Most standard units have a 9.5mm z-height but there are a few that have a 12.5mm z-height so check…. just to be sure. FYI, 2.5” refers to platter size and not a physical drive dimension.

SATA II is backward compatible with SATA I. Purchase a SATA II drive and if your chipset only supports SATA I the new drive will auto-negotiate down to the SATA I /1.5Gb/s speed. Some models of the Hitachi 5K250 drives are SATA I while others are SATA II. Check here to see which you have… though it really doesn’t matter. What matters is if the chipset you have will fully support a SATA II drive. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly which nForce chipset you have and therefore can’t comment on the exact specification ….. but I’m sure someone else here can.... or you could google it yourself.

If you already have heat concerns, I would suggest that you stay with a 5400rpm drive. The newer 5400 drives have a higher platter density and therefore will be faster than your old drive at the same RPM. The new drive will also run cooler and use less power with only a slight loss of performance when compared to a new 7200rpm HDD. The performance difference between the two isn’t nearly what it used to be.

As for a particular drive, like Ghamzi, I'd say check out a WD Scorpio Blue. They get very good reviews but really, once installed, you'd have a hard time telling a difference in any of them.

 

I installed a WD5000BEVT (Western Digital 500GB 5400RPM) Scorpio Blue in my dv5t a few months ago, it's a wonderful drive. It is essentially silent and very fast as well. I upgraded from a Fujitsu 160GB 5400RPM and the difference is very noticeable.

I usually buy drives based on their price per gigabyte. The 500GB was the best value when I was shopping. I personally only buy Western Digitals based on past experience (currently have four in my desktop, one in my HP, and one in an external enclosure). However, I am impressed with the Seagate ST9320423AS (320GB 7200RPM) that came with my 5310m - it too is very fast and quiet. Either of those brands should work very well for you.

As for 5400RPM vs. 7200RPM - the 7200s will provide the fastest access times and therefore make your system more responsive. They are more expensive per gigabyte, however.

 

Your current drive, if it is original, is an OEM drive and it's warranty is covered by laptop manufacturer instead of the drive manufacturer itself.

Only drive height varies and in your case it doesn't even matter, there's plenty of room inside.

In theory 1.5Gbps or 3.0Gbps sound like a huge difference but in practice only few desktop drives today can get even close to those ~125MB/s speeds, some drives can burst over that from their cache. If you look at the review here http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4954&p=2 with 7200rpm WD Scorpio Black and 5400rpm Scorpio Blue drives, you can see that they are around 80MB/s (0.8GB/s) transfer rate. In that same review is an SSD drive that doesn't just hits 1.5Gbps Sata1 limit... and that still is a lightning fast drive compared to spinning ones

So practically there is nothing lost or gained if you choose Sata1 or Sata2 drive, or if your laptop supports only Sata1. Differences are just marketing themes and couple odd commands / features for drives themselves: something that you already knew if you needed them.

 

Hey guys, thanks for your responses.

I was aware of the 3Gbps 5K250 drives but according to the specifications I got off Hitachi's website, my particular one has a 1.5Gbps interface.

My chipset is the NVIDIA nForce 630M with the Geforce 7150 graphics card. I tried having a look in the specifications for SATA transfer rates supported but can't find any information on it. Could someone please confirm whether it supports SATA II.

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/mobogpu_nb_7series_specs.html

Also from what KLF said, assuming my chipset/interface only supports 1.5Gbps, it would still not cause a bottleneck no matter what hard-drive I use (leaving aside SSDs which I can't afford anyway), right?

About the drive height I'll stick to the 9.5mm as HP's service manual states the laptop should support any 9.5mm hard-drive.

About the drives themselves, seems like for 5400RPM drives the Western Digital Blue is the one to go for, while the WD Black doesn't provide much of a boost on it for a 7200 RPM drive (according to the linked review). So is there any 7200 RPM drive that runs not significantly hotter than the WD Blue and at the same time manages to provide a significant boost on the WD Blue performance?

Finally does anyone know of a good portable hard-drive enclosure that connects via USB? I was considering converting my current hard-drive into an external hard-drive. I read online yesterday that sectors with errors can be deleted/ignored. I'm still not comfortable using the current hard-drive even if I managed to correct these errors (or whatever it is one does to them) and in any case I needed more space. It would be very useful if I can make a cheap portable hard-drive in the bargain.

 

Like you, I couldn’t find a direct information source, but based on this chart, I’d guess that your unit supports SATA II. With only a couple of exceptions, SATA II has been supported since the introduction of nForce 4 and all nForce 6 desktop boards provide support. The translation from desktop to mobile platforms is usually only a reduction in CPU & GPU performance with support features being nearly identical. Perhaps someone with an nForce 6 series equipped unit can give you a better answer, but that’s my guess.

At-any-rate, as KLF said, SATA I vs SATA II in practical application really has no impact to performance in your notebook anyway and the Native Command Queing (NCQ) feature that was new in SATA II generally only aids in server applications. There are however, from my point of view, a couple of practical advantages in purchasing a SATA II HDD over SATA I. By that I mean that if you somehow purchased an older SATA I HDD (thinking this is what was required), it would likely not have the power efficiency or the disk density of the newer models, both of which will aid in the total performance aspects of your unit. It would also likely cost you more per GB.

As far as external drive enclosures for your old drive, there are a lot to choose from. I’ve had one of these for a couple of years and have had no issues in the IDE flavor but they’re also available in SATA for USB 2 & eSATA. Just format your old drive after you install it (very easy) and if the drive is OK, you should have no issues.