2nd Hard Drive in UltraBay - Performance & Battery life?

I'm considering a T410, T410s, T510, or W510.

I'm thinking of going with a SSD for the main drive and slapping a 320 or 500g 7200RPM hard drive in the ultrabay.

I have 320g on my current laptop and I'm nearly out of room. I keep several VM's (although they arent always running) and tons of databases/files for clients which take up a lot of room. I hardly ever have the need for a CD/DVD ROM.

Can I expect normal performance from the drive in the ultrabay? Or would it be slower for some reason? How much would it kill the battery life having the second drive in there 100% of the time?

 

Performance will not be affected since it runs at SATA/300 speeds (even if it were SATA/150, you would not notice a difference in any HDD).

 

To clarify, you're saying having an HDD drive in the ultrabay will have minimal effect on battery life?

 

Good question! If I'm not seduced by the ultimate coolness of the tablets, I'm looking at a similar solution. I can always pull the HD, copy from CD/DVD to primary drive, replace 2nd HD and copy onto it.

If you go with the W701, you automatically get 2 drive bays, a 200+W PS... and a nice workout carrying it.

sgogeta4 only answered the performance question and did not address battery life. I suspect bat life will be harder to answer because some of it will depend on how often you spin-up the 2nd HD to read or write data.

 

On the W510 I consistently get 3 hours of battery life, with the wireless radio operating on max performance full-time. I have a configuration very similar to what you described - 256GB main SSD and 512GB HDD in the Ultrabay. I never remove the HDD from the Ultrabay. I don't know what battery life would be like with any other configuration however.

 

No, its not any slower than the regular HD bay but yes, you will take a battery life hit. How much? That depends on the HD and how often its accessed. My 500GB scorpio blue draws an average of 2.5 Watts an hour, which is enough to bring my T400's battery life down from around 9 hours without it in to 6-7 hours with it in. This is with programs being run off it as well, so not constantly active and not constantly idle.

Other Computers/Drives/Usage senarios may differ though.

 

The battery life impact depends on your particular HDD model (check its spec sheet) and level of usage. At low power idle most laptop hard drives use under 1 watt (the better ones use less than 0.5 watts). At active seek the energy consumption is usually between 2.5 and 4 watts (depends on mfgr, spindle speed, # platters, etc.). Therefore, it will have an effect but should be relatively minor (especially on the T510 or w510 as they have higher baseline energy consumption numbers [smaller relative impact]).

 

I have a T400 with 6 cell and Samsung SLC 32GB SSD and Intel x25-m in the ultrabay and I get 6watts idle and about 9-10watts typing or light surfing but those two SSDs have the best efficiency I believe. so you will probably consume more batter with a spinner

 

Question: For my T410S I would need an Ultrabay slim HDD adapter correct? Can I use any 2.5" HDD with it? Anyone have any recommendations for a 5400rpm hard drive with lowest power draw?

 

you can use any 2.5 inch hdd with 9.5 mm thickness, right now 640 gig is the largest.

 

I believe Hitachi 5400rpm drives tend to have one of the lower power draws (especially at idle). Although I haven't looked too much as of late. There should be a fairly comprehensive review on either AnandTech or StorageReview.

 

No, 750GB is. The WD7500BPVT is still 9.5mm thick.