Hard drive upgrade on MK5 - how much improvement?

I've read a number of the forum posts and am considering upgrading my drive to a Samsung HM160HC but I was hoping to hear from those who had done it before spending $60 and an hour carefully opening the hard drive caddy up - did it speed up your system?

Thanks to this forum, I've got an Mk5 with 2GB ram, so I'm maxed out there, but the thing boots *slowly* and I'm thinking it's gotta be the stock drive. So, for those of you who have upgraded your drive (but not those of you who are doing slick readyboost things - I'm not ready for that yet!) - how much did it help?

Thanks!
Aerik

CF-29 MK5, backlit chiclet keyboard, 2GB RAM, DVD / extra battery

 

What OS are you running?
What size HD & is it stock?

 

XP Pro, SP2, with drivers from Panasonic website. I've got what I believe to be the stock 80GB drive (actually it's from the first CF-29 I bought, also a MK5 - but I think it's stock)

(EDIT: This MK5 originally had a 60GB drive)

Thanks,
Aerik

 

The gist of it is, a year + ago people installed 7200RPM drives to upgrade. Now, today's newer IDE 5200RPM drives get about the same performance with much better (lower) battery draw.
Check out the CF-29 FAQ lots of good info and links concerning this question.

 

Have you tried booting it up without the DVD / media bay in. Maybe you will have to do the media bay mod to it http://forum.notebookreview.com/pan...cf-29-cd-dvd-swap-tutorial-lots-pictures.html or look into the SATA mod http://forum.notebookreview.com/pan...ic-cf-29-toughbook-thread-44.html#post5868558

 

The Samsung Spinpoint drives are great... When you can find them in stock at a good price.

 

With all this talk about upgrading HDD’s I'm surprised that I don’t see more talk about people upgrading to SSD HDD’s.

 

Just tried it out and it's the same, thanks for the idea though!

Sixty bucks at Microcenter ( Micro Center - Samsung Spinpoint M 2.5" 160GB IDE ATA/100 Hard Drive OEM) - not cheap, but okay

I think they're just too expensive, though I gotta admit, I was tempted. But did you see the specs on the spinpoint? It's rated shock tolerance is 350G - wow. Now there's a notebook drive!

Thanks, I read a lot of entries in the FAQ and the official thread, etc. Not all of them, but I did try to avoid posting total noob questions. Specifically here, I was hoping to get some insight into the boot time performance. I also read the (I think it was Azrial's) posts about readyboost and Windows 7, but I'm not quite ready to do that.

Thanks,
Aerik

 

A little cheaper on ebaY™: Samsung Spinpoint HM160HC 160GB Laptop Hard Drive PATA, and with Free S/H. :yes:

 

In fact this has been discussed at length.

EDIT
Go to this post in the official CF-29 thread to see what's been brewing.

 

Did you notice the CF-31 has an SSD as a factory-installed option? (and "Yes"; I know it's SATA. )

 

Yes, I ordered all options on mine.
NOT! It will be a while before I have one of those, probably around when the CF-33s are released!

 

Okay, so I did the obvious thing that I haven't done before, and booted both the MK5s I currently have next to each other at the same time. One has an 80GB drive w/Panasonic drivers installed, the other is 60GB with just vanilla XP. The 80GB drive kind of stuck at the welcome screen, and then again at the desktop (before the icons and taskbar appear) for awhile. So I swapped the drives and did it again - the 80GB drive behaved the same way. So either 1) it's the 80GB drive, 2) I did something wrong when I set up the OS or installed the drivers, 3) its' the drivers. I'm inclined to say 3 is impossible or people would be complaining about the drivers, so it's got to be either 1 or 2.

When I get my recovery CDs (any day now) I'll reinstall both drives and see if there's any difference.

I think I'm also gonna bit the bullet and just upgrade after that, but if the 80GB drive is performance impaired, I'll chuck that one and sell the other MK5 with the 60GB drive.

Interesting...

Aerik

 

Have you checked the rpms on both drives? The 80GB is going to be 5400rpm... But the 60GB may be a 4200 rpm drive.

If you have no drivers installed on the 60... That is why it is booting faster. The Recovery Disks should make a difference as Panny provides fro NO BLOATWARE unlike every other manufacturer out there.

Let us know...

 

Just did a little test and granted I am using Linux Mint but the 160 outperformed the stock 80 on the same machine using different drives. Bootup 1 minute 40 versus 1 minute 15. Mark 3 was used for the "test".

FWIW

 

hmmmm... Gork... Is it just me or does your siggy grow by about 1 Toughbook every two weeks?

 

The CF-25 arrived today.....can I put it on there too?

 

Okay, so here's my results:

Installing the OS with the recovery disks gave me a system that books slower than XP with no drivers, but slightly faster than the XP installed and then added Panasonic drivers (it's time on the welcome screen and before displaying the taskbar and icons seemed more normal)

With an OS installed by the recover disks, the 60GB and 80GB boot times are almost the same*

I then installed a new spinpoint 160GB drive in the caddy that previously housed the 60GB drive, and it booted in about the same time (somewhat disappointingly).

So here's the weird thing: My other MK5 with 1.5GB Ram, same BIOS version, seems to boot just a little faster, regardless of which hard drive it has. Just a little, like maybe a second or two. I don't know if it's due to having less memory, or the Kingston 1GB stick in that computer is slightly faster (than the 2GB stick in the first MK5), or what. I tried removing the dvd drive and SD card I had installed to see if that mattered, and I rechecked the BIOS to make sure it had the same settings. The only thing I didn't try was swapping the RAM.

Then, for fun, I did Passmark tests on both systems. I got similar "whole system" results - probably no statistically significant difference - and some slightly different numbers for the memory test and hard drive tests, but hard to interpret.

I think I'm done researching it though - and will be sticking with the "slower booting" MK5 that has the 2GB of RAM and backlit keyboard (and now, 160GB drive).

Make a long story short, the new drive didn't seem to improve boot time, but I'm guessing it will result in better performance for other things where the drive speed is the bottleneck.

Aerik

P.S. using the recovery disks is sweet - much easier than manually installing drivers. Anybody know if the wireless driver update from panasonic is really necessary though? Has that been covered on another thread?

 

Go to intel's site. They have the up to date drivers. This is where I got mine but check first to see if it's the same card . Support for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection

For $20.00 you could have the EnGenus 8602+S WiFi card that is used by most of us toughbook owners on here ENGENIUS WIRELESS MINIPCI EMP-8602 PLUS-S Free S&H NEW - eBay (item 230454583178 end time May-25-10 10:47:57 PDT)

 

Yeah... You might want to update. MS screwed A LOT of people with Intel cards with an update they did last Nov-Dec.... Though I think they fixed that in another patch release. (Of course they didn't mention anything about it publicly!) But I haven't had any calls from past customers about the dreaded BSOD that was rlated to using old Intel drivers.

 

So, I couldn't get off this weird thing where one MK5 is booting faster than the other (sorry Mods, if this is getting too off topic) so I did more experiments. To make a long story short, MK5 number 2 will boot fast if I put a floppy drive in it. I fooled around with the boot order in the BIOS, tried all kinds of things, but that's about all I can figure out so far.

Weird, huh? Anybody got any ideas?

Thanks,
Aerik

 

In your spare time just for grins try swapping keyboards. Weird idea but it seems the only difference.
And on another note I was messing around with BIOS to turn on the new GPS and the only thing that worked was restoring defaults. Did you try that?

Jeff

 

I upgraded to the Samsung it is a great drive. Performance is there. In fact i upgraded my desktop drives to Samsung as well. Very noticeable performance there as well.