Hey everybody,

lately I am getting the impression that the IC25N (precisely, its an IC25N030ATCS04-0 with 4200 rpm and 30 gigs) in my X22 is getting a tad old and noisy - with 25k power on hours and a load cycle count past the million.

So I ran HDTune and benchmarked it. These are the results:

1) Avg. transfer rate: 15,2 MB/sec, 1,2 MB/sec min, 19,9 MB/sec max.
2) Access time: 18,7 ms

Is this out of spec? Could I exspect a much better performance if I replaced it with a newer, albeit still 4200 drive?

Cheers,
Martin

Any PATA 2.5" laptop drive, 5400rpm or 7200rpm, up to 320GB, will be a tremendous improvement.

Do a backup RIGHT NOW, and replace the drive (or the system) ASAP

Cheers,

Bill B.

OK. THANK YOU!

Just is another 4200rpm drive going to be any faster? I had a look around and it seems thats the only new thing you get for IDE on ebay etc. these days...

Huh? Do not buy another 4200 rpm HDD.

You want to purchase PATA/IDE Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 (7200 rpms) or 5K100 (5400 rpms) -- largest available is 100GB.

You want to purchase PATA/IDE Western Digital Scorpio Black (7200 rpms) or Blue (5400 rpms) -- largest available is 320GB.

----------------------
You want to install Windows XP Pro from official IBM/Lenovo Recovery CD(s). You can create them from the service partition on your original factory HD (Press F11). You can purchase them directly from Lenovo for approximately $ 45 USD.

You want to purchase USB to PATA/IDE adapter, such as Apricorn's Drivewire. Connect your old HDD to this adapter.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812161002

There are no 7200rpm WD PATA laptop drives, 5400rpm only.

My favourite one - out of the newer drives - is Samsung 160GB/5400 which can still be found new/sealed.

Thanks for the advice, but these drives are way too expensive for the purpose. The X22 is merely my emergency laptop.

So I am looking for a replacement drive < 30$.

Hence my question again: Is another 4200rpm drive going to be any faster then the performance posted in my initial post?

Cheers,
Martin

I have purchased USED Hitachi Travelstar 5K100 and 7K100 HDD(s) from eBay (and my local computer recycler) without issues.

I would purchase a USED 5400/7200rpm HDD before I would purchase a NEW 4200rpm.

Also, I would purchase 100GB or larger and
Use partition management software to allocate 55GB for C: partition (assuming that you place temporary work-in-progress data in "My Desktop" and "My Documents" and allocate the rest for E: partition for finalized data that you would like to keep.

--------
But again, if you were satisfied with your Windows XP start-up time and internet file download speeds, I am not going to persuade you to purchase a faster HDD.
--------
7K100 Spec sheet
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib. ... _sp1.3.pdf

Thanks very much for the advice. I will try to hunt down a faster drive then.

Take a look in the For sale section: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=97374

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=87309&hilit=pata
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=101364&start=0&hilit=pata