Last month, in an incident involving a wriggling baby, my reliable Dell Studio 1537 was dropped on a tiled floor. It made some strange noises (coming from the hard drive), valiantly tried to boot Windows, but then ended up freezing on the BIOS screen.
I don't trust laptops as the primary source of important data, so this was not a data recovery issue. I was more interested in preserving the laptop or at least the drive for general use. Considering I've been looking at buying a new laptop, I wasn't so keen on replacing parts on this one.
Being a longtime fan of Steve Gibson, and listener of
Security Now, I bought
SpinRite 6 and fired it up.
After leaving SpinRite running on level 2 overnight, the hard drive appeared extremely sick. SpinRite reported 90 days to get through the entire 500GB drive, which meant drive access was VERY slow.
At that point, I switched it off. I had two options:
- New laptop ~ $800+
- New hard drive ~ $50-700
A fairly minor fall such as this one, was unlikely to damage anything but the hard drive (or the screen, which was fine.) So it was a safe bet that a new hard drive would get the laptop up and running again.
Now 3 more options, regarding the replacement drive:
- similar 5400RPM cheap drive
- 7200RPM performance drive
- SSD for ultimate performance
Being a computer geek, I could NEVER bring myself to simply replace the drive with another crappy one. That's far too practical. SSD would be fantastic, but a good one, with enough space (128GB+) is almost the same price as a new laptop. Keep in mind, this laptop is almost 2 years old, meaning in another year or so I'd probably retire it to media centre or home automation duties.
The mid-level performance drive was the way to go.
Ah, but here's what I didn't mention before - there was a fourth option - option 2.5, if you will: a
hybrid SATA/SSD drive! These are an awesome balance between price and performance. The main thing to know is that overall performance of these drives is between a 10,000 RPM and an SSD drive - for a great price.
If you read hybrid drive reviews, you'll immediately see that (at the time of writing) the
Seagate Momentus XT
is the drive to get. Even though they make a 500GB model, I chose a 320GB model to save a bit of cash - I definitely wasn't even close to using the 500GB drive.
The Seagate Momentus XT is the clear choice because they get fantastic reviews and are very fast. The regular SATA drive is 7200RPM and has 32MB of cache.
Just quickly, if you're wondering how these drives make things faster, a very basic explanation is that the 4GB SSD is used as a cache for frequently accessed files. This means if you are using Photoshop, then all the files that Photoshop is using will be loaded in the SSD, thus giving you SSD-like performance for that application. It's more complicated than that (since the operating system's files are also partially loaded in the SSD) but the drive's technology makes an effort to prioritise files that are used more often than others, over time.
Anyway, it's faster!
And to give you an idea of performance increase, here are the typical performance improvements quoted when comparing Hybrid to 7200rpm SATA drives:
- Boot time: 40% quicker
- ITunes: 40%
- Adobe Photoshop: 20%
Did I notice the speed difference?
In a word, YES!
My laptop is now noticeably more responsive. Windows resumes from sleep much faster, and also boots noticeably faster. I also find Firefox is much more responsive, being the performance hog that it it.
I am going to get one for my desktop too - as I feel the normal SATA drive is really holding back my Core i7 processor in some types of operations.
OK, I want one too! Where do I get it?
In Australia, it's best to buy parts like this from small-mid online computer retailers since we don't really have PC Parts megastores.
But in the USA or Canada you should check out the hard drives sections here for the best prices and easy shipping/returns etc.. :
[By the way: I just noticed Amazon USA is doing a deal on this drive at the moment - $100 with free shipping anywhere in the US - check it out here!]
The silver lining?
The cool thing about this incident, was that the original hard drive was a fairly slow 5400RPM Samsung. The new Seagate has an average read time of about 3 times faster - now programs load noticeably quicker in Windows!
If you are underwhelmed by the speed of your laptop, I highly recommend upgrading the hard drive, since it's a pretty cheap easy upgrade overall. If you have less than 4GB of RAM, then you should definitely update your RAM now - another cheap and even easier upgrade.
If you have the money, then consider buying a full blown SSD drive. They are not cheap
If your laptop is still under warranty, then perhaps consider buying an official upgrade - but if not, then do it yourself! It's easy, fun, and rewarding when are using a machine, whose improvement you are responsible for!
Good luck and please post all questions in the comments here - I'll be happy to help you out.
in Firefox or IE, they force you to install their 'download manager' add-on. Why? Not really sure. Perhaps they are using it for statistics, or something else.
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