F-4005 with Travelstar 7200 rpm

does this upgrade eliminates the stuttering problem in some games?

even my hitachi had more noise initially. but now is very silent

Noob question, but how hard is it to format the new HD and get everything up and running? I was hoping I could just run Norton Ghost on the old drive, pop the old drive out, throw in the new one and run Noton Ghost and move on. Is this possible, or is there far more to it?

Thanks in advance!

That's... well, sorta' how it would work.

I think it would all depend on whether Norton Ghost can access a external USB hard drive, cause you would need to be able to have both drives connected to the computer at the same time. Unless you were going to Ghost it to a series of CD/DVD ROM discs. I think that's possible too.
Someone that knows better/different feel free to correct me.

I just ordered a 7200 RPM drive for my 4005 as well, and I'm hoping I don't regret it. Those things are quite expensive.
I went with the Seagate 100GB 7200.1.
I've liked Seagate's products for quite some time now, and the 5 year warranty is a nice bonus as well.
Looking at the numbers, in comparison to the Seagate 5400.2 that came in my 4005, the 7200.1 is 10MB per second faster on the minimum and maximum transfer speeds, and close to 10MB per second faster on the average. It's also around 7 to 10 MB faster at the peak.
Technically, the Hitachi is a bit faster in transfer speeds, but it will be interesting to see if the Seagate's supperior IO performance has any benefit to how I use my lappy.
IO performance is usually more important for file and web servers, as opposed to single user workstation roles.

I think Ghost backs up your data on CD or DVD disks. I figure when the new HD is installed, you just boot from the CD. Not sure though....

Keep us posted on your new HD's. I already installed 2 gig's of the OCZ Ram you recommended, so I am interested to hear your thoughts on the performance boost!

Thanks again!

Thank you
I've been waiting for somebody to make this test.

I suppose F-4005 comes with the same 5400rpm 100GB Seagate as Travelmate 8104. Although they've received good reviews and they provide good transfer speed my personal oppinion is that they have a very bad random read (track-to-track seek time or whatever name has this thing).

I recently had a chance to use an older Toshiba Tecra laptop which is equipped with a Hitachi Travelstar at 5400rpm. I want to say that there is a very noticeable difference (to use your words) between Travelmate and Tecra in the way the same Windows programs respond when launched. The time required from the moment you click on an icon till you have the application on your screen is significantly lower on Tecra. Compiling, linking, accesing internet at the same time also is faster.
It makes you think the laptop is very responsive and Windows operation is smooth (which is not the feeling I'm getting when using the Travelmate).
I also tested HDD transfer rate on Tecra which showed something I've expected: lower transfer speed than Travelmate's Samsung Spinpoint which is regarded as one of the fastest 5400rpm drives.

I was wondering how that 5400rpm Hitachi would work in a Travelmate 8104. I didn't have the chance to test it.

So, I think it's not only the 5400 to 7200 you notice but also the difference between HDDs.

Cheers,
_EnF_

Unlike Acronis products (TrueImage) Norton Ghost can access external USB/Firewire drives just fine, even when booting from Ghost CD/DVD. It has proper DOS drivers for that, if I remember correctly. You can connect new drive in USB enclosure and clone old drive to new (with optional resizing/stretching of partitions if new drive has different size). But the new drive will not be bootable yet. You'll need to boot from Norton Ghost disk with new drive put in as primary in laptop and run Utilities on the Norton Ghost disk. There is one there to choose active partiton (to make partition active/bootable). That's a strange glitch in disk cloning I encountered myself.

Alternatively you can backup disk to DVD or series of CDs and then restore to new disk from these CDs. This worked fine and did not require additional partition activation.

I haven't tried it myself (I did my restore from a NAS), but TrueImage 9.0 claims to work with USB/Firewire.

1E-9

I am hoping Western Digital will release there line of 7200RPM Notebook drives so I can upgrade my Ferrari's drive I refuse to buy anyone elses crappy drives.

do we have serial ata or the old ata?

in ferrari 4005 ATA100. but I think that serial-ATA doesn't have much more improvements

you can test your new hd with hdTach if you want.

the burst rate is the same between P-ATA & S-ATA

I think the HDs read & write the same speed