What type of HD upgrade for NC10?

Im thinking about upgrading the hard drive on my NC10 with a faster drive, with considerably more space.

I know its a 2.5in sata drive in the NC10, but what speed drive do i get?

speeds ive seen, and can afford and obtain easily, go all the way up to 7200rpm.

will 7200rpm in a netbook case generate too much heat and fry the netbook and/or the drive itself?

what speed drive is currently in the default white NC10?

 

The NC10 comes with a 160GB 5400rpm HDD. I have seen both Samsung and Hitachi used.

I doubt if any of the latest generation HDDs will create a heat problem, but 7200rpm will also use a bit more power when on idle. A good compromise may be either the WD5000BEVT or the new Hitachi 500.B 5400rpm 500GB. Or, if you can find it, a 250GB single platter version of the 500.B. The 320GB HDDs won't give much, if any, performance boost over the provided 160GB HDD.

John

 

thanks for the info.

 

Today's notebook hard drives are pretty efficient and I would go for a 7200rpm drive myself.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2.5-hard-drive-charts/Idle-Power-Consumption,681.html

 

how would i go about backing up whats already on the nc10's internal hard drive and then putting it all back on the new drive (operating system, partitions etc) ?

theres 150gig already on the nc10's drive spready across two partitions created at initial bootup. no way im reinstalling all of it again!

 

Read the quick guide to cloning a HDD.

John

 

very useful, thankyou John.

 

Do they make 10000rpm 2.5in sata drives??

 

They do, but they're not for laptops! They're designed to go into blade servers and they're usually higher in size than a standard 2.5" drive.

 

Here it is. More here. You will need a hammer and chisel to get the 15mm thickness into the NC10 while the power consumption (6W read/write, 4.5W idle) means that it will get somewhat warm.

My recommendation as of today would be the Hitachi 5K500.B since it has class-leading read / write power consumption of around 2.35W and only the 500GB Seagate 7200.4 offers (slightly) better performance.

John

 

I just did a harddrive shuffle, moving my NC10 from a 60gb SSD (OCZ Core v1) to a 200gb 7200rpm Hitachi that's rather power hungry so I'd have room to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu. I went from maxes of about 7.25 to 6.25 hours with the change.

However, there are no heat issues. It's warmer, but not nearly as warm as I've had other notebooks get. I'll be switching back, not because of heat or battery drain, but because the SSD gives me no advantage as a VMWare drive.

 

i ended up getting a hitachi travelstar 7k320 320gb 7200rpm sata 2.5in drive.

a cursory glance at net reviews seems that its good, but does anyone have any first hand experience?

is the throughput on the drive actually going to be so fast (between 80megabytes-40megabytes per sec) that the processor and general system speed becomes a bottleneck instead?

also got myself a cheapo 2.5in external enclosure so i can do johns trick of cloning to the external and then swapping drives around.
one question about that - does trueimage actually increase the partitions on the clone to fill the new hard drive (if for instance the destination drive is much bigger) or am i going to have a 320gb drive with two 80gig partitions and a whole heap of free space?

 

Whether the CPU is / will be the bottleneck depends on how much processing there needs to be on the data being read or written.

The automatic mode in TrueImage should increase the partition sizes in proportion to the increase in disk capacity. There is also a manual mode should you, for example, want to expand D: but not C:.

John

 

i just noticed a problem with this when ive come to use it and clone my drive.

it says to make a recovery cd and clone the internal drive when booted from the cd..... cant be done that way on a netbook??

tried cloning from within windows xp using trueimage and the clone disk wizard just seemingly hangs in a forever 'processing' loop.
i assume that is because it cannot lock the partitions for cloning (so no additional data is written whilst data is cloned) because they are system partitions.

need some help because the thing is all set up ready and im stuck like a lemon.

 

I have TI 2009 and there's an option to create an ISO image of the bootable media. Once you have your ISO you can create a bootable usb stick - I found some info here: http://www.acronis.com/support/kb/articles/388/index.html

If the bios is similar to the nc20 you can hit the escape key during the POST and you'll get a small menu allowing you to select the usb stick as the boot device.

Never had a problem with travelstar drives although I personally prefer the WD black series.

 

thanks baz. i did find the create recovery onto usb option after some searching.

had no end of problems cloning the drive.

from within windows it wouldnt work to start with. infinite loops or direct crashing.

booting from the usb and attempting to clone would result infailed to write to sector 0 errors. :/

tried from within windows again and it rebooted the machine and cloned at bootup.

only thing that had changed was that i had unplugged the usb flashdrive and swapped the 2.5in enclosure to that port.

i suspect a dodgy port on the left hand side of my nc10.

anyway its all cloned now and ready for me to crack the case this afternoon.

will update when its all done.

 

Hey Focalpoint - sorry to hear of your woes with the cloning. I use clonezilla occasionally to do my cloning, it's a live cd / usb based cloning utility based on linux and is free. It takes a bit more learning to use it but it's always performed perfectly for me: http://www.clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/

 

ill check out that clonezilla program for the future.
i might have need of it soon to clone some drives on my desktop pc.

anyway the upgrades done and theres an obvious increase in system performance resulting from the 7200rpm drive in there now.

actually opening the case was the hardest thing to do in the upgrade.
very difficult to open, but then i guess it wasnt really designed to be opened.

 

I'm going to install a hitachi travelstar 7200rpm 320gb hdd in probably next week.

 

I just installed a hitachi travelstar 7200rpm 320gb hdd. Very quiet and very very fast!

 

well done. brilliant little drive isnt it?
gets a little bit warmer now, but nothing major and certainly nowhere near as hot as some laptops ive had in the past.

did you have a heart attack trying to open the case as i did?

 

i have a 3200BEVT in my lappy it's good

 

Yea it was a little hard at first but after I got one side opened the rest was easy! Now I'm just waiting for my wireless N card to arrive so I can install that and this time it will be even easier to take this apart.