PCG-K37 & 160GB drives

(For purposes of this discussion I have about 20 years of PC hardware experience)

Has anyone else recently upgraded their VAIO or any other laptop to either the Hitachi or Seagate 160GB drives and experienced MAJOR speed issues, and not in a positive way?

I have several laptops which I routinely clone/upgrade when a higher capacity drive comes out, but in this instance I was specifically dealing with two identical Sony PCG-K37 VAIO notebooks which are about 18 months old. These laptops came new with 80GB drivesk which I routinely upgraded over the last 18 months, first to 100GB then 120GB drives. Both the 100 and 120 are 5400RPM drives are fast for a notebook hard drive. However after cloning/upgrading to the new Hitachi 160GB drive I immediately noticed that everything was taking MUCH MUCH longer (at least 3 to 5 times longer typically) for normal every day functions that require accessing the HD such as booting Windows, browsing folders, launching software programs, cleaning ID3 takes from MP3 files etc. You name it, if it involved directly reading or writing to the hard drive the performance was through the floor

I finally ran some benchmarks and was horrified when I saw the results. The drive was performing 5 to 20 times (not 5-20%, 5 to 20 times!) slower in linear and random reads than any comparable drives running on the same laptops, even 4200 RPM drives. The disk seek time which should be between 10.5ms and 12ms depending on which drive, was routinely benchmarking between 35-45ms which is insanely slow.

Needless to say I tried the new 160GB on both identical laptops with the same results. I've never seen all kinds of problems but not one quite like this before and it seemed very likely I had a bum drive, so the reseller sent me a new Hitach 160GB but it performed equally bad. Convinced there was some incompatibility between the new Hitach 160GB and these VAIOs, they then sent me a Seagate 160GB but once again the performance and benchmarks were the same... atrocious. It made no difference whether it was a clean XP installation or the installation that was cloned from the perfectly working 100GB and 120GB drives, or which laptop was used. In fact, I even cloned the poorly performing 160GB drive installation BACK to the 100GB and 120GB drives and they still worked perfectly. Bottom line, the issue has nothing whatsoever to do with the software installation/configuration.

It stands to reason there's been a significant fundamental design change to these new 160GB drives that's causing them to behave in this fashion with these VAIO laptops. On that topic, I noticed that at least the Segate drives did indeed employ new technology called "perpendicular recording" to achieve this new storage capacity. However I have no idea if this is at the root of the problem and if so why.

There is no new BIOS update on Sony's website that I could find nor did I find any mention of this issue. Of course these 160GB drives haven't been around very long so that's not too surprising. If anyone has experienced this problem please let me know. For now I'm at an impass and just about to return all of these 160GB drives.

 

Both Hitachi and Seagate use perpendicular recording technology for their 160GB 5400rpm 2.5" drives. I've got the Hitachi 160GB SATA in my new Dell E1505 and i also have a Hitachi 160GB SATA that i bought and haven't opened yet because i can't decide if i want to try installing it in my new IBM Z61m yet or not cause i may just sell it and buy a cheaper 100GB 7200rpm instead, especially if there seems to be issues with the new 160GB drives.