On Aug 10, 2010, at 7:51 AM, Simon Royal wrote: > > Hi > I have an old 15GB 4200RPM drive in my ThinkPad 240x. > I want to put something bigger in it. 15GB just aint big enough for two OSes. > Is there any mileage in getting a faster drive, like a 5400 or 7200RPM drive? > It helped in a Mac I had a year ago. > > Simon Royal
Recent experience with a Mac notebook and a workstation showed me that high quality SATA solid-state disks are faster than most any hard disk, especially one you would put into a notebook. I'm really impressed with the Intel SLC-based 64 GB disk as a boot disk in a workstation - it flies. However it is really expensive and small capacity. I also like the 160 GB MLC-based Intel drive I put into my MacBook Pro - the machine boots quickly and is more responsive than with a 7200 RPM hard disk. Again, expensive for the small size but lower power and more rugged. However, these machines both have lots of RAM and modern 64-bit dual or quad core CPUs so they stress the disk system more than older machines. In each case, the OS can make use of all the RAM also. I have no experience with PATA solid-state disks. I expect they would work OK in your 240X but I do NOT know that. Most reasonable size SSDs are now SATA and you might have to hunt for an appropriate PATA device. I would also wonder about BIOS limitations - some older machines had limited disk sizes. Again you would probably be doing an experiment and the cost in both time and money might be higher than you would like for an old machine. Our (small sample size) experience has shown that the faster 7200 RPM disks tend to fail more often than slower ones - it may be that we don't treat machines as well as we should but we take them in the field and they get banged around. As we are hard on disks, we are experimenting with SSDs - so far so good at least with Intel devices. Back up anything of importance on any machine but especially on a notebook. Stuart _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
