Upgrading W500 Hard Drive: Is this a good idea?

My w500 shipped with a Hitachi 7K200 160 GB drive. It seems fast enough, but I was wondering if I could do better. I ran across that the 7K320 320GB is $89 with $20 rebate and free shipping. Seems like an interesting proposition

1. A Newegg review makes reference to there being issues with the drive with a T61p and its BIOS. Is this teh case with the w500 and T500? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145228
2. Is the perfromance increase worth it (on XP, though I might try Vista or W7)?
3. Will power consumption be more, less or even with my current hard drive? Tom's Hardware only lists the drive's bigger brother, which the 7k320 seems to be a little more efficient than. As a corollary, how do heat and noise compare?
4. Should I even bother to do it?
5. Would the Seagate 7200.3 or the WD Black be a better idea? (would the price difference be worth it?)

 

Buy it only if you want/need the capacity. The performance difference will be little to none (slight boost in areal density should help throughput by a small margin). Power consumption and heat should be comparable (they are both 2 platter 7200RPM drives from the same manufacturer).

Alternatively, if you have a use for a spare 160GB drive (e.g. a PS3 w/ a 40GB drive) that may skew the incentives a bit (I bought a 320GB drive at a discount to put my 160GB in my PS3).

 

The only thing faster would be a SSD, which are expensive and have limited space.

 

yes SSD is expensive but the price is dropping heavily and 256gb and 512gb are already on the way/here

 

I put the WD5000BEVT 500GB 5400 RPM drive in my W500 (bought it with the 160GB 5400 RPM drive).

 

I'd agree, half way. When dealing with large files and situations where the disk can optimize transactions (ie parallel file access like in server and some disk intensive applications or some games) there can be quite a really noticeable difference because of the higher data density. I bought my last HD (Seagate 100gb 7.2k) in favour of the Hitachi 100gb 7.2k because it was back then the model with the best parallel io transaction performance. And it literally was X times faster for my database intensive programming and testing compared to the Hitachi 40GB 5400 drive (I never tested but it was like 4 times faster or even more, or from sluggish and annoying to just-done). There are io and performance benchmarks at soragereview, and even though synthetic benchmarks don't mean you see the difference for your day-to-day job it really means there can be a quite huge difference under certain conditions.

The big question is if you should care, and the answer is for most users simply "no". So for most day-to-day tasks like bootup and application startup it's the access time that makes the difference and upgrading from his current drive is probably not worth the money.

BTW: Sandisk showed 3 new 3rd gen SSD drives at the CES with 60GB, 120GB and 240GB for 149$, 249 and 499$ respectively. They said they will be available in the mid of this year.
I find the 240GB drive very interesting, since for me this is like breaking the barrier between between performance and capacity at a prize point I'm willing to pay.

 

You probably won't notice a performance increase, so buy only if you need the space.

I have it in my t61p and there is no issue with the bios. It works fine.

 

Thanks for all the help. If there is going to be no noticeable improvements at all I might as well not bother. I'll wait to see for future hypothetical larger, faster, more efficient drives. When I might actually want or need the storage.

I'm staying away from SSD's. My extensive research into those has told me they are not worth it to me right now and for the forseeable future. Sad if that really is the only drive (be i the Intel, Samsung SLC, or any of the pie in the sky future ones) appreciably faster.