Quiet IDE 2.5" Drive

C

CamaroZ28

Gawd
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Jul 10, 2008
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I have a old Toshiba Portege 3500 Tablet with the factory Toshiba MK4019GAX HDD in it and it is painfully loud. I use this computer for taking notes in class and in a lecture hall with only the professor speaking, this thing echos throughout the room... it's a bit embarrasing. Also it's really slow.

So I'm in the market for a new 2.5" IDE drive and since I don't have any experience with laptop HDD's I wanted to see what you guys recommended. Here are some of my requirements:

  • As quiet as possible
  • Decent speeds for web browsing/office apps on Windows XP Tablet edition
  • Size is not a factor, so I'm looking for the lowest priced quiet/fast drive
  • Somewhat low power, wouldn't mind sacrificing speed to save on batter life
  • No Western Digital, I won't purchase from them again after many failed products and THE WORST support I've ever delt with

I was looking at the Seagate 5400.3 Series drives, are these quiet efficient drives? I've been using their desktop drives for a long time and they have been great, but don't have much experience with their mobile products. I also saw the 7200.1 series and they looked like they had great performance, but do these have much higher power draw then average mobile drives and where would I buy one of these, can't seem to find them on most common e-tailers.

Let me know your recommendation, thanks.
 
If you don't mind some stuttering, i'd actually recommend an ocz core ssd drive. They are right at 100 after Mail in rebate. That'll fit all your needs. Silent, lower power and not WD.
 
Griff805 said:
If you don't mind some stuttering, i'd actually recommend an ocz core ssd drive. They are right at 100 after Mail in rebate. That'll fit all your needs. Silent, lower power and not WD.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by stuttering?
 
I mean that the OCZ core drives have an issue with stuttering in Windows during normal usage. Meaning that the computer "pauses" for a second or more. It's not true for all computers, some are having the issue and some are not.

What seems to be causing it is a lot of small writes going on in the background during Windows usage. Small writes are what SSD drives aren't the best at, especially the JMicron controller that the OCZ core drive uses. You can turn off the pagefile if you have enough system memory (6GB+), also turn off indexing, as well as a few other things that might help avoid any stuttering. You'll have to read through some posts on the OCZ forum.

If you can find a place to purchase the OCZ core drive with a return policy, then you could try it on your system, if it works fine, keep it, if not return it and go for another 2.5" IDE drive.
 
Griff805 said:
I mean that the OCZ core drives have an issue with stuttering in Windows during normal usage. Meaning that the computer "pauses" for a second or more. It's not true for all computers, some are having the issue and some are not.

What seems to be causing it is a lot of small writes going on in the background during Windows usage. Small writes are what SSD drives aren't the best at, especially the JMicron controller that the OCZ core drive uses. You can turn off the pagefile if you have enough system memory (6GB+), also turn off indexing, as well as a few other things that might help avoid any stuttering. You'll have to read through some posts on the OCZ forum.

If you can find a place to purchase the OCZ core drive with a return policy, then you could try it on your system, if it works fine, keep it, if not return it and go for another 2.5" IDE drive.
Click to expand...

Hmm that is unfortunate because since it is an old computer I only have 512MB of memory and can't really afford to turn off the page file, also I depend on indexing for my school documents. It sounds like this won't be the type of drive for me. Do you have any recomendations on mechanical HDD's?
 
damn with RAM so cheap these days you might want to reconsider that 512MB there. I've found newer WD drives to be pretty damn quiet. I have a WD Passport with a 2.5 drive in it (Scorpio Blue I think) and it might as well not be there. Just try to get something 5400RPM and you'll generally be ok with the newer drives.
 
Tha_Bomb said:
damn with RAM so cheap these days you might want to reconsider that 512MB there. I've found newer WD drives to be pretty damn quiet. I have a WD Passport with a 2.5 drive in it (Scorpio Blue I think) and it might as well not be there. Just try to get something 5400RPM and you'll generally be ok with the newer drives.
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DDR2 ram is cheap, but not PC133 ram. Like I said this is an old laptop and right now the feature I am not satisfied with is the hard drive, the ram keeps up fine for Windows XP Tablet and only being used for notes and web browsing. I already said I will not consider WD.
 
Griff805 said:
If you don't mind some stuttering, i'd actually recommend an ocz core ssd drive. They are right at 100 after Mail in rebate. That'll fit all your needs. Silent, lower power and not WD.
Click to expand...
The stuttering would be an absolute deal killer for me.
 
Sorry to resurrect this thread but I figured this information would be useful for someone who searches for a quiet and fast IDE HDD and finds this thread. I ended up going with the Samsung HM160HC (5400RPM 8MB cache). A quick review on it's performance can be found here. It turns out this drive is currently the fastest IDE notebook HDD and can be had for pretty cheap. I bought mine for $60 at this site. It's actually about 4 times as much space as I need, but the smaller 80GB version (HM080GC) ended up actually being about $4 more expensive after shipping so I figured the 160GB was obviously the best deal.
 
Lazn_Work said:
Just something to consider, I don't know what RAM max your system can take, but PC133 sodimms are not THAT much http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=64X64NB133-SPEC-N&cat=RAM
Click to expand...

That is extremely cheap for PC133 ram, I have no been able to find a price that low anywhere else. However, I'm skeptical of the quality of this brand (never heard of it) as well as the website selling it. Do you have any experience with either and if the ram was not compatible with my computer would I be able to return it. Max ram on my tablet is 1GB but people have said that it is known to be picky with brands. Thanks.
 
I have purchased from that site and had to RMA to them before, so the website/store is decent.. But they only give in store credit if you have to return to them. As for that brand of RAM, it was just the cheapest PC133 sodimms on that site, they had a few others for a few bucks more.
 
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