E6520 Owner's Thread

Well, I think the constant parking of heads every 10 to 15 seconds and spin-down/ spin-up of the hard drive is not going to save you anything except power. The WD2500BEVT is at €32 now. To get a new/ bigger/ faster hard drive after some time won't hurt you if you invested over €1100 in the e6520.

I plan to replace it with an Intel 320 SSD in the near future. To me even the vibration of the hard disk is irritating if you type for several hours.

If you want to be flexible: place a short cut to the batch file on your desktop and run it when the constant clicking drives you nuts. The hard drive will revert to the APM defaults after a restart anyway.

I just wanted to spare anyone some hours of investigation if (s/)he feels disturbed by the clicking noise. Greetings to all,
Rewolfer.

 

Use wdidle3 in dos, you can turn off spin-down for WD hd.

 

I didn't use wdidle because it won't show up for the 2500BEVT and I hesitate applying firmware to drives that are not confirmed to be compliant.
As I perceive it, this firmware will only fix the constant spin-down/up behavior but not the parking of the heads (that primarily causes the clicking noise).
Well, I won't test this. If anyone else does, please report your results.
Greetings to all,
Rewolfer.

 

You should change the hdd to ide mode in bios. wdidle will not show the drive in ahci or raid mode.

 

Love this 6520..I don't get any vibration or noise and is so fast with the Momentus XT. Win 7 I'm getting use to and like it alot.

 

This article suggests Win7 is gaining enterprise momentum, but still lags the waning XP.

GK

 

The mentality is "it works, don't change it". XP works just fine until you start getting into certain types of configurations (ie: more memory).

See, they could've put all the enhancements of Win7 into a package like XP and corporate would've adopted it easy. The problem is, Microsoft was spinning Vista and Win7 as something revolutionary, and from the point of view of IT maintainers, that's generally more headache than anything else. And the change from NT4 to XP is arguably substantially less than the change from XP to 7, so if that's any indication as to why corporate is so resist to that change...

Dell doesn't offer downgrade rights for XP anymore on their configurator. I think Microsoft was trying to push people away from doing that, though I think you can still manually get it done.

 

As I see it, volume customers are eeking out 32-bit computing on more than capable 32-bit hardware while the industry endures its bumpy transition through Vista to 64-bit computing... and while the world endures a great recession. I don't see it as having played out otherwise.

I've done the same, except I can afford to put a copy on Win7 on my few XP era machines and enjoy a new lease on life.

GK

 

Is the E6520 under 6lbs with the 6 cell battery?

 

I just bought an OCZ Vertex 3 240GB, and i can confirm it supports 6Gbps