Help in purchasing new hard drive for ThinkPad T60

I am intending, as stated in the thread title, that I would like to purchase a new hard drive for my 3-year-old ThinkPad T60, which its warranty is ending in less than 2 months' time. I know of a place in my region that sells hard drives at a cheap price. But I do not know if it's really worth switching a new hard drive with an old one, due to my worries of problems in post-purchase of the hard drive.

One of my queries involve the kind of hard drive that is most compatible with the machine. From what I hear from this forum thread posted about 1 1/2 years ago, I have heard that Hitachi, Fujitsu & Seagate drives are the most suitable, in which this fact I would like to confirm. Also I have read in my research that the hard drive speed is of less concern to compatibility with the machine, so I wonder at what speed is best suited for a ThinkPad T60 (refers to one of the posts of the above link about 7K rpm drive not compatible with a T23).

Another query I would like to make is doing a clean install of everything, i.e. drivers, OS, software. I have a separate OS disk (Windows XP Professional), & I have all the drivers installed. Is it possible to install everything manually without using the Recovery disks?

Just to note that the pack of recovery disks are already "broken"; it has so many scratches that it can't be read in my DVD drive the last time I tried. I also have created a factory recovery DVD, but it not only costs some extra time to rerun the Rescue & Recovery factory default (it installs NIS without my permission & prevented me from doing any CHKDSK scans), but also took 10GB of my 80GB hard drive. Was left with half the remaining 70GB space when I finished updating the softwares & drivers.

My sincere apologies about the large paragraphs I left. Most, if not all, of my questions are highlighted in bold.

Thanks to the readers & administrators for taking some time to address my queries in this thread. I sincerely hope to get some answers soon.

 

Just pick a drive. They'll all work as long as it's SATA. I prefer Seagates at the moment because you get a free download of DiscWizard from Seagate's website. It's a very good imaging tool.

 

I have contacted Lenovo/IBM support for advise, & I was given a link to the list of HDD parts with the FRU number as shown below:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s...=MIGR-62741&selectarea=SUPPORT&tempselected=5

My original intention is to get a 160GB 7200rpm from Hitachi or Seagate, but it appears that the highest compatible HDD space (& tested by the manufacturer) is 100GB for 7200rpm. Have anyone having the same machine (ThinkPad T60) ever tried upgrading beyond 160GB for 7200rpm HDD? If so can advise?

Just to note that my ThinkPad T60 have been running Windows XP Professional SP2 (upgraded to SP3 after running Microsoft Update). The type is 1952.

EDIT: In regards to ZaZ's comment, I do not think I would need to use a cloning software. I just would like to know if there's any good HDD that's faster & larger in size than my current 80GB 5300rpm Hitachi drive, & compatible so I can install with ease.

 

Don't buy the drive from Lenovo, unless you like paying 3x as much for half the storage. Get the Hitachi from NewEgg for $70. It'll work fine in your T60.

Link

You certainly can do a clean install using an OEM XP disc, but you won't have the recovery partition if you care. The ThinkVantage button won't work either. Make sure you get a copy of the SWTools folder on the C:\ before swapping the drives. It contains all the applications and drivers installed on your machine. I personally wipe the drive myself, but it's a personal preference and I don't use much of the ThinkVantage Suite.

As for the recovery discs. Try making a copy of them using ImgBurn. I might suggest using a desktop drive if you can. Notebook drives are notoriously poor readers. If you can get it to read, the copies should work. If they really are toast, you can buy a set from Lenovo. They're $45. You can use the money you saved by not buying the hard drive from them. You might want to post this over on ThinkPads.com. Someone over there may have a set you can get at a considerably reduced price. Good Luck.

 

Yep, I'm not intending to buy a hard drive from Lenovo. In fact I know of a place in my region where I can get hard drives at a very cheap price, but whether I can refund or not if tested not compatible or faulty is a question over there. Thanks for the suggestion.

& yeah, I am currently following the Windows XP Clean Install Guide. So the software part of changing to a better hard drive is done. Thanks again for the suggestion.

If I can't get a hard drive perhaps I can look into the sites you provided. Thanks again pal!

P.S. Perhaps someone can advise me on getting hard drives that are not stated to be tested by Lenovo as compatible with my machine? (See link in my previous post of this thread.)

 

Any SATA drive should work regardless of whether it's on Lenovo's list or not. I wouldn't put to much emphasis on whether or not it's on the list.

 

I replaced my 100GB SATA OEM drive with, first, a Western Digital wd2500bevs 250GB 5400rpm SATA and then, a 320GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K320. Both worked out of the box. In both cases, I just used Acronis True Image Home to clone the previous drive and was able to install and boot with no problems.

And then I tried it with a Western Digital WD4000BEVT 400GB. The clone worked fine but I couldn't boot to the drive. I've researched a workaround, but haven't tried it yet.

And, even though the original drive was 7200RPM's, when I switched to the higher capacity 5400RPM drives, I didn't notice an appreciable difference in speed.

Edit: I bought the drives from different sources. Two from Newegg and one was on sale at Best Buy.

Edit2: When using cloning software like Acronis or Ghost, I find it's best to clone directly to the bare drive right out of the box. Don't partition and format before cloning. You'll just have to delete the partition anyway.

 

Actually ghosting/cloning software is not a problem for me. I do not intend to "clone" data from my old hard drive, & I have all my personal data backed up, with all the driver setups in place.

The only concern I have is whether or not there will be any problems or not in installing the drivers. I used to be worried about the BIOS too, since someone said he/she had trouble updating it because of the hard drive being incompatible (this problem was resolved already).

 

They obviously didn't know what they were doing. I don't think this is an issue.

 

Anyway I'm deciding between Hitachi, Seagate & WD. So far in my research Hitachi 160GB 5300rpm is the cheapest ($60+) I can find for "160GB & above", while the other 2 have 250GB with about $90 (prices are all in S$).

I understand that this newegg website is from US, so probably the cost will be about 1.5X higher (at most).

Anyway, if I'm looking for balance in performance & power consumption, what kind of manufacturer can I actually look into?

 

There's a ton of hard drive threads in the hardware forum.