New HDD for the lappy: WD Scorpio 80GB/8MB
godzilla525
Western Pennsylvania Member
I recently purchased a new hard drive to replace the injured Hitachi Deathstar in my laptop. After looking around for a bit, I settled on the Western Digital Scorpio WD800VE. 5400 RPM, 80GB, and 8MB of cache. The reason I picked this unit was due to the maximum rated operating temperature of 60°C. All other drives I looked at had a rating of 55°C or lower, with the Hitachi E7K60 sporting a rather dismal rating of 40°C.
I'm concerned about temperature because some genius engineers at Dell decided it would be a good idea to put the hard drive in an steel box right under the video board heatpipe. The range the Deathstar usually operated in was 45 to 55°C, on occasion hitting 60. :shakehead
This has the effect of causing the bearing lubrication of the drive to migrate away from where it's supposed to be or possibly evaporate. I picked the computer up once after a week of constant operation only to have the Hitachi drive begin to sound like a diesel truck going uphill full-throttle. This little incident prevented the heads from parking properly on shutdown, and it took me 45 minutes to get it unfrozen and going again. The drive reports to have remapped some 440 sectors and has operated 'normally' ever since.
Anyway, the C: partition on the new WD drive is within the first 5GB of the unit, so I figured I'd post an ATTO bench of this thing...it's absolutely dead silent with acoustic management *off* (factory setting). I'm having a hard time getting used to it... any noises it does make, such as the very faint parking noise, sound much more refined than Hitachi/IBM units...
I'm concerned about temperature because some genius engineers at Dell decided it would be a good idea to put the hard drive in an steel box right under the video board heatpipe. The range the Deathstar usually operated in was 45 to 55°C, on occasion hitting 60. :shakehead
This has the effect of causing the bearing lubrication of the drive to migrate away from where it's supposed to be or possibly evaporate. I picked the computer up once after a week of constant operation only to have the Hitachi drive begin to sound like a diesel truck going uphill full-throttle. This little incident prevented the heads from parking properly on shutdown, and it took me 45 minutes to get it unfrozen and going again. The drive reports to have remapped some 440 sectors and has operated 'normally' ever since.
Anyway, the C: partition on the new WD drive is within the first 5GB of the unit, so I figured I'd post an ATTO bench of this thing...it's absolutely dead silent with acoustic management *off* (factory setting). I'm having a hard time getting used to it... any noises it does make, such as the very faint parking noise, sound much more refined than Hitachi/IBM units...
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