2nd hard drive for Gateway M675

It should work fine, but, WAIT!!! why not buy a 7200RPM instead of a 5400RPM Speed, it may cost more, but, in-the long-run you'll be better off performance wise, also if you haven't already, update your RAM to at least 1 or 2GB ,then you won't have to go out & buy another Lappy ,that's if, you Plan-on keeping that notebook a few more years?

Your not buying that drive direct are you?

Unless hard drive space is at an absolute premium, that $115 would be better invested in a 80GB 7k100 IMHO. There isn't a huge difference between a 5400 and the first gen 7200, but the 7k100 gives a substantial performance boost over even a 5400RPM drive. Either, way, good deals

There are couple of things I wanted to point out after reading this thread.

1. There is only room for one hard drive in a laptop computer. So don't plan on being able to just "add" a second hard drive somewhere inside. An external USB one yes, but not an internal one,

2. About upgrading to a 7200 RPM hard drive, consider this. My notebook came with a 4200 RPM hard drive, When I saw that specification, I thought, "Wow, a 4200 RPM hard drive is ridiculously slow, that's the first thing I'm gonna upgrade." So I bought an 80gb 7200 RPM Hitachi Travelstar with 8 mb cache for around $130 and installed it.

Once the drive was up and running I did some benchmarks by timing how long the laptop took to boot to the desktop, and the new drive was only 5 seconds faster! So $130 spent just so the computer would boot up 5 seconds faster. A very poor investment, IMHO.

I did some research that confirmed my findings. An 80gb 2.5" 4200 RPM Hitachi Travelstar (my old hard drive) has a transfer rate of 18 mb per second. An 80 gb 2.5" 7200 RPM Hitachi Travelstar (the new one) has a data transfer rate of 19 mb per second. Not too impressive, to me at least, when I consider the money spent.

So bottom line, don't expect much improvement going to a 7200 RPM drive. I caught a lot of crap on the NewEgg product review site by pointing this out, but it's true, and I have the stats and firsthand experience to back it up.

1. While that is true of your laptop, it is certainly not true for all laptops. There are many machines caple of , and designed for 2 hard drives.

2. Depending on usage, a 7200RPM drive can make a HUGE difference. My old 4200RPM drive was ~22-25mbps. My 7k60 is ~30-33mbps. Where you got 19mbps from, I don't know, but it is DEAD wrong.

You are correct tha tit doesn't make a huge difference on just booting windows. It would be silly to purchase a faster HDD just ot get Windows to boot faster. There are many other reasons for utilizing a faster HDD though. Windows makes heavy use of the page file, even if you have sufficient RAM. For a gamer, especially when loading complex, large textures, a faster HDD makes a VERY noticable improvement during times of loading textures and loading levels. If you do a lot of DV work, you will slice the machine time greatly. TIme taken to let my machine encode DV work was almost caught in half (as it should have been) by upgrading to a 7200RPM drive.

Here is just one test done on the early 7k60 drives: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/hitac...B_7200rpm.html

Take note of the file sizes and imagine working with 20-30+GB files. The difference in time is enormous for the small investment.

All that considered, the new 7k100 Hitachi drives (the one you bought) are even faster than the 7k60 drives (partly from faster, lighter arms, etc and partly for the increased aerial density). A 7k100 would provide an even bigger boost. If you caught a lot of flack on the eggs review boards for posting similar disinformation, it was most certainly deserved.

Real bottom line: You won't be blown away by boot time increases or application load times. If you are doing any kind of work that involves HDD thrashing, the increase from 4200 to 7200 is tremendous. In many cases (mine usage included), a considerably faster HDD will provide much more of a performance increase than increased RAM.

That entire post was a waste of bandwidth. An opinion is one thing, but flat out misinformation should probably be delivered a little more humbly.

Great, a flame war.

1. OK, prove to me that a Gateway M675 is capable of holding a second hard drive. I bet you can't.

2. Source of data transfer rate info was the SiSoftware Sandra 2004 benchmark list of various hard drives and their typical transfer rates.

I stand by my statement that upgrading to a 7200 RPM drive is a foolish waste of money, for those of us who are not impressed by a five second faster boot times or relatively minor performance boosts.

I don't know why you seem personally offended by my remarks. I had no idea that the topic of 7200 RPM hard drives were such a sensitive subject for you. I will continue to post here and I hope I have your "permission" to do so.

Flame war? Hmm interesting. I was just clearing up the false information. 1. Besides the fact that I have serviced it (and several other dual HDD capable notebooks), here is the caddy for the second HDD http://www.mundocorp.com/product.asp?specific=jomnppepe and from http://www.notebookforums.com/post23...1731sp75.shtml If you want any more "proof", just let me know specifically what you want, and maybe I can spend another 2 seconds finding you some more information. Or maybe next time I have one in, I can video tape myself installing and working on the machine with two HDDs. Interested in seeing other dual HDD notebooks? The M675 is by far not the only one. Dual HDD notebooks have been around in the mainstream for a few years. 2. Don't ever trust synthetic benchmarks. Real world tests are much more accurate and representative. Somewhere I still have a barage of benchmarks comparing my OEM 80GB 4200RPM to my 7k60. I will gladly dig them up if you like. Of course the links I posted clearly show the more accurate numbers. Compman was kind enough to due some extensive testing a while back using HDTAch and ATTO and post the results here also. Here is the thread: http://www.notebookforums.com/newrep...k100+benchmark I agree that spending the money for a 5 second boot time increase would be foolish. But spending the money to cut your machines work time in half is certainly not foolish. If you aren't doing any HDD intensive work and the only improvement you were attaining was a 5 second boot time decrease, then it would be silly to upgrade. Relatively minor? I don't know of anything else one can do to their machine for that kind of money to more than double the performance. I was in no way offended by your remarks, just clearing the water of blatant fallacies. The FACTS are that in HDD intensive tasks, the 7200RPM can half, and in some cases actually more than half the time the machine is working. Here is a summary comparing to other 2.5" HDDs, but the slowest is a 5400RPM which is still considerably faster than a 4200RPM. http://www.storagereview.com/article...otebook_1.html And one that shows a head to head against a same size 4200RPM drive (that I may get hung for posting ) http://tinyurl.com/pjvzx I hope you do continue to post here, and certainly don't wish for you to leave. Be careful posting blatant fallacies as matter of fact though. HDD aren't sensitive to me. Fallacies, in such a blunt, blatantly inaccurate manner do bother me though.

I stand corrected on the 2nd hard drive issue. I had never heard of a notebook that was capable of this before.

I was basically just trying to save the guy some money, assuming he's like me and 80% of people these days, who are struggling just to put food on the table. Going without essential items because you blew your money on a piece of computer hardware that you thought was going to make a huge difference in performance, but it doesn't, is no fun.

There are more than enough websites on the internet trying to convince you to waste your money on the latest and greatest PC upgrade, under the guise of providing "Unbiased Product Reviews". I have fallen for their hype far too many times. Because of this, I try to counteract the hype when I can, since I don't work for the hardware manufacturers or get any free stuff from them.

Maybe my edited reply to the OP should read as follows:

"I replaced the 4200 RPM hard drive in my notebook with a 7200 RPM drive, and the difference was barely even noticeable, other than a 5 second faster boot time. Frankly, I thought it was a waste of money. If the 5400 RPM one is within your budget, I think you'd be just as happy.

Also, I would make sure the notebook is actually capable of holding an extra hard drive, so you don't end up with an extra unneeded hard drive like I did."

great mark of a good moderator, never late in stepping in heated issue ... hats off

mark of a gentleman

to all -

man, this forum is cool!

cheers ...

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God"

Matt 5:9

Is there any chance that caddy / sled would work with an M685 (same as NX860X/XL)?

For a 2nd hard drive?

That series does not support a modular bay for another drive. I have an 8510GX, which is the same body as the M680...and the M685 as far as I'm aware. There's no room for another tray. This series is a bit slimmer than the M675, since they switched to the Pentium M series of processors, over the Pent 4M series. I believe the system is noticeably thinner(if I remember correctly from comparing mine to my friend M675).

The m675 is extremely versatile. It actually has 2 modular bays, and an HDD can go into either. You will lose either your floppy drive, or your optical drive while using the second hard drive. Both modular bays are hot swappable, though meaning you won't have to power down the notebook, swap the device, and boot back up. You can just switch them on the fly. The right bay will hold an optical drive (in it now) or a second HDD. The left bay will hold a floppy (I assume in it now), memory card reader, or a second HDD.