Is this a good FZ set-up?

i'm thinking of getting the FZ290 CTO with 2.2ghz processor (I'd get the 2.0, but i don't want the T7250 instead of the T7300)...and the cheapest HD.

And then what I plan to do is get the hitachi travelstar 7k200 drive, which was recommended as being much faster. and then doing a clean install of vista home premium.

so my questions are:

1. is this a good set up and worth it? how much faster is that drive than the ones offered by sony?

2. how is the hybrid drive compared to the others?

3. should i get the retail version of vista home premium or the OEM system builder's version. the latter is half the price on newegg.

Thanks!

 

I was planning on doing something similar with mine. I compared the two drives on newegg and there was only a 1-2 microsecond difference between the 4200rpm that was installed in mine and the 7200rpm you mentioned above. For me that is not enough of a performance gain to justify the additional cost.

As far as whether to go with retail or OEM?? Retail you can reinstall if you have two, OEM is a one time deal. If you have to reinstall at some point, you'll be S.O.L. if you buy the OEM.

As far as hybrid drives compared to other types- I don't know, I haven't spent much time researching the subject.

 

I just bought the FZ290 CTO with the 2.4ghz processor. I wouldnt go below the 2.2ghz processor because anything slower than that and you don't get the 4mb L2 cache and the faster front bus speed of 800mgrz or something like that. I asked someone at sony about the 160gb hybrid drve and they said it was just a little faster and didnt take up as much processess when retreving files. I'm not sure if that makes any sense lol but the sales person didn't seem to know much about it at all. I just went with the cheapest HD. 120gb is more then enough for me.

 

@nate ohio...can a 7200rpm drive really be only 1-2 milliseconds faster than a 4200rpm drive? that doesn't make sense considering how pokey everyone says (or rather complains about) how a 4200rpm drive is.

 

I think that is just everyone's natural reaction in the 4200-vs-7200 comparison. Even I was apprehensive about having a 4200rpm drive in a brand new laptop. Considering that 5400rpm was the slowest available on the HP laptop I bought a year and a half ago. That being said, I notice no difference between the 5400rpm running XP and the 4200rpm running Vista.

These are from newegg and I have never known them to post inaccurate info.

Toshiba 4200rpm Price from newegg= 135.99
8MB Cache
AVG Seek Time - 12ms
AVG Latency - 5.5ms

Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 Price from newegg= 204.99
16MB Cache
AVG Seek Time - 10ms
AVG Latency - 4.2ms

For me, the only discernible edge the hitachi has is the 16MB cache. But not enough of an edge to justify spending 205 dollars to upgrade.

 

it seems the more i research computer stuff, the less i know. after months of hearing about how a 4200rpm drive is way too slow and how everyone needs a 7200rpm drive, i find out the latency difference is imperceptible.

in another thread, someone tells me they can boot up vista in 20 seconds when i've been hearing 60+ seconds for most people. i don't know what to believe.

sigh...

well, maybe i'll post a poll in the "what laptop should i buy" forum asking if people can tell the difference between drives.

nate...thanks for the info. it might just save me spending unnecessary hundreds of dollars for another drive.

 

No Problem. Don't get discouraged. Many of us insane system tweakers will do everything possible just to get and extra 5-10 seconds off of our boot time. For most people, they never even look into how to do this.

 

are you happy with the fz in that case? is there anything you would recommend?

also, have you checked out my poll about the hd speed? some people are saying it makes more of a difference with a new os and games, i think.

 

I am pretty satisfied with my current setup. The only thing I may change in the future is the amount of RAM. Just because I like to have a ton of RAM available.

As far as HS speed performance in games, I can kind of see that. I am not a gamer, so that doesn't appeal to me. I hope I helped out some. Good luck with your purchase.

 

But those numbers only show how long it takes to move the heads, an the wait for the first sector to appear under the head. What about the transfer time? How many bytes per second are the two drives able to produce? If a drive is fully defragmented these first two numbers will not play as much of a factor as the transfer rate. You will epend more time reading data than you will seeking the start of a file.

Gary

 

I had put in one of the 160Gig 5400rpm HDD's from X205 into my FZ and I saw no real difference so I just put back the 200Gig 4200rpm HDD, it's working just fine so why mess with it.

 

The seek and latency times do not come close to telling the whole story when it comes to hard drive performance. Take a look at the review here to see how that Hitachi is blowing away the competition: http://www.storagereview.com/HTS722020K9A00.sr

 

As for the 160G hybrid hard drive option that is newly available from Sony, there should be a performance boost as well as a battery life boost with that drive. The built in 256MB flash memory is a new technology for use with Vista that allows the drive to spin down do save battery life and do all its writes to the flash memory. Then when the cache gets full it can spin the drive back up. This is pretty new stuff and there isn't a lot of information about its use in the real world. But one article I read a few months ago suggested that with typical use the drive would only spin up for a couple minutes every 1/2 hour. So if that holds true you could see a significant battery life boost.

There should be more info out there, but I don't have time to go find it right now.

 

good looking computer, too bad they didn't give a higher screen resolution option