Hey guys,
Well, it looks like I will be upgrading my hard drive for the 2nd time in about 7 months. Got my (free from customer service!) Dell Inspiron E1705 shipped with an 80GB 5400RPM drive, which I upgraded to a 100GB 7200 Seagate 7200.1 for the performance increase (which I now can't live without). However, this is almost full and getting degraded performance and lots of fragmentation, so I'm probably going to upgrade to the Hitachi 7K200 200GB. I found it for $210 on ZipZoomFly.com, which is the cheapest I could find. It was $5 more on Newegg.com, which has now sold out of them it seems.
I had a few questions that I'd be obliged if you'd help me with...
- This drive comes with optional encryption technology. Is there any way I can actually utilize this?
(I'm guessing my options will be limited since my copy strategy is to copy an image of my drive with Norton Ghost to an external drive, put the new drive in, and then boot from the Ghost CD and then restore it... this is the best way I've been able to find. If you know of a better way to get an exact image, let me know.)
- Are there any other 200GB 7200RPM 2.5in SATA HDD's out there, or is this the other one available retail? It seems options are pretty limited. I've seen product announcements for other ones, but they don't seem to have actually made it to stores as standalone products...
- Are the Hitachi's still bad as far as drive failures go, or is that just the old Deskstars?
Thanks for your help!
Well, it looks like I will be upgrading my hard drive for the 2nd time in about 7 months. Got my (free from customer service!) Dell Inspiron E1705 shipped with an 80GB 5400RPM drive, which I upgraded to a 100GB 7200 Seagate 7200.1 for the performance increase (which I now can't live without). However, this is almost full and getting degraded performance and lots of fragmentation, so I'm probably going to upgrade to the Hitachi 7K200 200GB. I found it for $210 on ZipZoomFly.com, which is the cheapest I could find. It was $5 more on Newegg.com, which has now sold out of them it seems.
I had a few questions that I'd be obliged if you'd help me with...
- This drive comes with optional encryption technology. Is there any way I can actually utilize this?
(I'm guessing my options will be limited since my copy strategy is to copy an image of my drive with Norton Ghost to an external drive, put the new drive in, and then boot from the Ghost CD and then restore it... this is the best way I've been able to find. If you know of a better way to get an exact image, let me know.)
- Are there any other 200GB 7200RPM 2.5in SATA HDD's out there, or is this the other one available retail? It seems options are pretty limited. I've seen product announcements for other ones, but they don't seem to have actually made it to stores as standalone products...
- Are the Hitachi's still bad as far as drive failures go, or is that just the old Deskstars?
Thanks for your help!
