D901C with the 1T WD HDD

Hello,

I recently bought a new 1T WD hdd. My previous storage was composed from 3 WD hdd a 200 GB WD 7200 rpm in the battery bay and a 320 GB and a 500GB hdd in the primary bay. I had win 7 installed on the 200 GB hdd, program files on the 500 GB hdd and the page file on the 320 GB.

I decided to buy a new hdd in order to get read of the 2 smaller hdd. I moved the 500 GB in the battery bay and installed in the main bay the new 1TB hdd on the seconf SATA controler. I installed win 7 proffesional edition on a 48 GB partition on the 1TB hdd, the program files on a 30 GB partion on the 500 GB hdd, while the page file was moved to a separate partition on the 500 GB hdd. System runs smooth without problems and I got a a peak transfer speed between hdds of about 75000MB for arge files. However I am a little dissapointed, the systems boots slowler then the previous configuration. The transfer and operations with small files are slow. The fact that I put the programs files and the page file on another hdd helps a little as it moves the heavy stuff away from the 1TB. I can get high speeds when I transfer large files, but otherwise it is slower then my previous hdd. It is more useful for back-ups.
If somebody is insterested in buying a 1TB WD hdd I can make more tests.

The temperatures of the new hdd are around 50-55 degrees under heavy load.

PL

 

this is a slow booting laptop in general. it is because of the on-board hard drive controller which is software-based. it sucks.

i have raid 5 and it is the slowest disk access i ever encountered. my older d900t with hardware onboard raid smoked this one in terms of performance.

 

When you formated the disk, what was the allocation unit sizes?

 

I let windows to do the standard allocation, with 4096 bytes per cluster.

The dystem boots slower then the prevoious configuration.

 

It’s not an allocation size problem.
Most probably your new HDD is not 7200rpm and so is not as fast as the old one. If you want speed/performance you should get 2 HDD in RAID 0 for the boot system (Win7), and then you will see the difference.

 

I was thinking to put the windows on an express card ssd, but they are horrible expensive and they are unreliable.

 

Don't go SSD (my opinion). You can get two good 500Gb HDD for a nice price configure them in RAID 0 and you will see

 

You are right, but I want to keep as well the 1TB hdd in the laptop. I hope it will fit in the battery bay. If I can can not keep in it is kind of a waste since I could have bought 2x 3.5 of 1TB hdd.
In order to have raid 0 is it required for the hdds to be identical, or is it enough to have the same size?

 

Identical is the perfect scenario. Two HDD with the same specs but different brands can give you problems.

 

Hi pasoleatis, remember if you do go for RAID make sure that write-caching is enabled in Device Manager as it makes quite a difference to performance!

 

Thanks for the advice. If i can fit the 1TB hdd in the battery bay I will buy another 500GB and install the raid 0.

 

I still have my old D901C as a backup notebook.

I now use the the model in my sig. I have as my primary drive an SSD. I don't know ... I have never been this happy with boot up time performance period. Maybe its a combination of Win7 + SSD, but by placing my OS and primary applications (some VMs) on the SSD - this notebook is a serious hurry when it boots/loads stuff.

It was not all smooth sailing though, I did have some initial issue with my SSD drive (see some of my older posts) - but sager sorted it out.

I really feel that the SSD was the single biggest factor that improved my notebook experience and brought desktop HD performance to my notebook.

Well, that's just my 10c worth - I love my (tad expensive) SSD drive

 

Well I am officially disapointed on th 1TB WD hdd. It is only good for handling large file. Even the 500 GB hdd at 5400 rpm is better. This was an expensive failed experiment. Is there any way I could transfer my system on another partition, without reinstalling everything?

 

Use Acronis to backup the system partition and then restore to a new partition and/or Disk.

 

I use paragon partition manager - it gets the job done and I also use it for image backups etc.

 

+1 for Acronis.
I've used paragon a couple of times and ended up with corrupted data.
This was a few years ago though.

 

After installing the cloning software my windows broke. It was stopping at the first screen so I made a fresh install.

In conclusion the WD 1TB hdd is very bad with small files. The sytem was booting slow and everytime I was copying files from it was making the computer unresponsive. I reinstall the windows on my other hdd and everything works great.

This WD 1TB hdd is good only when operating with large files. So far it was a waist of money for to buy it.

 

Was it Acronis? You didn't needed to install. Just run boot cd and clone the disk. But of course a fresh install is always better.

 

I think it was paragon. Now I have a fresh install which runs nice and smooth.