New M570RU-U w/ Hitachi HD20500 IDK

I got my barebones M570RU-U (8800) from OCZ (ebay) and set it up with all the old parts from my current system (T9300, 4GB RAM (oem), Intel 4965 AGN, and applied IC Diamond on CPU and GPU) except for the HDD for which I bought one of the new Hitachi 500GB 7200RPM drives- and wow, does this drive perform! If anyone is looking for a new HDD, they are on discount at newegg for a few more days. Don't worry about the negative reviews as they are from Mac users complaining about DOAs and other issues unrelated to PCs. The issue is a lot of Macs only support 1.5Gb/s Sata and this disk comes pre-configured to 3.0Gb/s and they are too "hip" to realize they can D/L Hitachi Feature Tools, a boot time program to change hardware features of the drive, which brings me to another point. If you get this drive definitely run this program and deactivate the "power saving" feature that causes it to spin down much to quickly(a matter of seconds after no use), making an audible click sound (unless your very mobile). It definitely has an edge on the WD 320GB 7200RPM I have in my old system and runs way, way, way cooler, barely touching 50-51 under MAX workload for at least 30 mins. A fresh Win7 install boots to fully loaded desktop in 45-50 seconds. After all drivers, MSE and some other boot stuff added I am getting a fully loaded desktop in just shy of 60 seconds.

Only trouble I had with the system was the included drivers disk, which is inop with Win7, but fortunately I had all the drivers saved to my external from making the Win7 plunge with my old notebook. I know it's outdated hardware, but is a very capable system for a great price considering I already had parts lying around collecting dust. (barebones: $550, HDD: $111 w/ ship, $96 after I get the $15 rebate card, = $646!!).
Congrats to anyone that actually finished this, and thanks for reading!

 

nice story, thanks for sharing! enjoy your system!