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Best laptop HD ever

It’s seems amazing. The Hitachi Travelstar 7K60 is an amazing hard drive. It’s blazing fast, and 7200 RPM (that’s the same as most desktops). Unlike the 4200 drives that ship in most laptops.

It’s given me a giant improvement on my system. I really feel the difference. On boot, my computer used to hang for 20 seconds, while the drive would spin like it was about to fly to the moon. Now it doesn’t do that at all. It’s speeds along. Very, very fast. And runs surprisingly cool. Oh, and it’s quiet. It’s a great drive.

I took my old 40GB IBM Travelstar (IBM’s storage unit joined with Hitachi’s, hence the name for the new drive is also Travelstar), and got an IBM Ultrabay Adapter for it. I keep my floppy drive out now, and put a 2nd HD in there. I haven’t used a floppy drive in ages, so it’s no loss. And if I need it, I can take that drive, or the CD-ROM out. So I don’t really loose any functionality.

I’ll be putting Linux on that other drive soon. A few other things need to get done first. That’s not priority #1.

Great product. Good for the geek you need to get a Christmas present for ;-).

1 reply on “Best laptop HD ever”

I must agree with your comments about the new Travelstar 7K60…I bought one a copule of weeks ago (after finding out about it from your post! They were the cheapest at http://www.zipzoomfly.com ( http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/.....ode=100519 formerly googlegear.com by the way) where I got mine with free 2-day shipping for $232 (it’s gone up to $266 now but same shipping deal), and I have since reinstalled XP Pro from scratch and I see a boot time of right around 20 seconds including login time.

I don’t have any extra internal bays on my Dell Inspiron 1100, but I put my old drive (a 30GB drive that I’m pretty sure is a 4200RPM) in a USB 2.0 2.5″ HDD case ( http://store.yahoo.com/meritli.....nal-1.html ) along with my old 5400 RPM 40GB Travelstar that I upgraded my old Dell Latitude CPxH with before its motherboard died, so I have two nice external hard drvies for storage and a nice new internal, and emptier pockets (thanks to your blog 🙂

One of the things I really like besides the quietness and coolness (in two ways!) that you mentioned, is that the power drain is about equal to my old drive. Basically the new smaller technology in this drive causes it to use less power to spin so even though it’s a higher-capacity drive with higher RPMs the power drain is almost identical (sometimes slightly higher but not by a noticeable margin) to the older, smaller, slower drives (see Tom’s Hardware Guide benchmark, which I don’t have a link to right now).

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