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bighead · Dec 13, 2004, 03:07 PM

Well, a friend of mine recently advised a friend of his to buy the new Seagate 100 GB laptop hard disk. I was surprised to see that the box said 5400 RPM, not 7200 RPM as had originally been announced. The specs were on a sticker on the box, though, so I began to think. I peeled the sticker off, and lo and behold, the original spec of the drive was 7200 RPM. Piffle. I was going to buy the 7200 RPM drive.

Well, I actually did order the drive last night from NewEgg, RPMs be damned. 100 GB, 5400 RPM, $204 plus tax and shipping. Cheaper than the slower Fujitsu until recently (that one was above $225 for quite a while.)

When he was installing the drive into his friend's 867 MHz TiBook yesterday, I couldn't believe that the drive was a slimline model. I suspected that it would be a 12.5mm drive, but it sure looked like a 9.5mm one. Didn't measure it though. While zeroing the drive before transferring the data, I couldn't believe how quiet it was. Mirroring the data from the old drive via a FireWire enclosure was nice and quick. No word on the effects of the drive on battery life.

I'm going to install the drive into my AlBook when I get it and let you all know how it works. It's not 7200 RPM, but it's still better than a 4200 RPM 80 GB drive.

betsbillabong · Dec 13, 2004, 04:15 PM

Bighead, I'll look forward to your review.

What's the cache on the Seagate drive?

bighead · Dec 13, 2004, 08:07 PM

Originally posted by betsbillabong:
Bighead, I'll look forward to your review.

What's the cache on the Seagate drive?

It's an 8 MB cache. Looks like a nice drive. (I'm hitting reload on NewEgg's status page to get the tracking number. Hehe.)

audvidsvs · Dec 13, 2004, 08:14 PM

I bought this same drive at Best Buy but the box did say 7200 rpm.
So far I am still hoping they will compensate me somehow for the mistake but I am not taking it out of my 12"PB either way.

It is much less noisy than the original drive.It seems to use less juice and it runs cooler,much cooler!

I am pissed that it is not what it said on the box but it is a 100gig drive.
Also it was $199.00 at Best Buy.

I wonder if a smaller actual 7200rpm drive yields much better performance?

mrmister · Dec 13, 2004, 10:05 PM

Does anyone know where the 7200rpm versions are? i can't believe they aren't out yet...it's been forever.

bighead · Dec 18, 2004, 03:33 PM

Good news and bad news.

Good news is that I successfully zeroed the hard disk and installed 10.3.7 and got my user and all of my apps installed.

Bad news is, after opening Entourage the machine froze and I heard "click click click" from under the keyboard.

When putting my PowerBook into TDM and plugging it into my G4 tower, it freezes Disk Utility. The machine refuses to boot with the drive installed. When I pulled the drive out of the PowerBook and tried to copy the Microsoft User Data folder over. It took 5 minutes to copy 160 MB of data with the drive connected to a FireWire board. Not happy. I'm currently zeroing the drive, which is going OK so far, but the marble drop sounds show up every now and then.

I've RMA'd the drive from NewEgg and will be getting my replacement within a week or so. Until I get some more experience with the new drive and see how it works, I wouldn't recommend anyone buy these drives. I'm sure what I got was a fluke, but it never hurts to be safe. I'll report back soon.

f1000 · Dec 18, 2004, 04:00 PM

I've had mine for about a week now. No problems yet.

The drive runs cooler than the original 4200 rpm 40GB Toshiba, but it's still warm to the touch. It's also quieter, but not completely silent.

All in all, I'm happy with the drive so far. It's great to be able to store 40GB of AIFF in a laptop, as well as a few ripped DVD's for good measure.

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=238496

Guy Kuo · Dec 19, 2004, 02:05 AM

I have the drive in my Powerbook 12 inch as well. No problems so far.

If you want a really quiet drive, try the Fujitsu 100 gb 2.5 inch drive. I put one in my wife's Ti and I wasn't sure if it was spinning up the first time I fired it up. It was that quiet. By comparison, the Seagate is about equal to my old Toshiba drive.

Musti · Dec 19, 2004, 02:51 AM

Originally posted by Guy Kuo:
I have the drive in my Powerbook 12 inch as well. No problems so far.

If you want a really quiet drive, try the Fujitsu 100 gb 2.5 inch drive. I put one in my wife's Ti and I wasn't sure if it was spinning up the first time I fired it up. It was that quiet. By comparison, the Seagate is about equal to my old Toshiba drive.

You guys are so lucky you can hear your hard drives spinning. Using a Ti 867, after 5 minutes the fans turn on, and stay that way until I turn the machine off. I was very happy with my Ti 667 DVI's whisper quiet operation before. Too bad I got a replacement from Apple.

audvidsvs · Dec 19, 2004, 05:12 AM

When I got my Ti book I was advised by a few people that the 667DVI was the one to get just for those reasons.
The 667 fans rarely come on but when they do it sounds like a train on the desk.
It seemed like the best balance between performance and usability to me.

I also wish I had known about the Fujitsu drive a few weeks ago when I got the Seagate,just so I could shove the Seagate back up BestBuys ass and get something different.
They don't care that I got a different drive than it said on the box and my options with them are to remove it and get my money back.
Not exactly helpful onn a 12" PB so I am just keeping it. It is huge in capacity but I just prefer to buy what I am sold.
Now there are little stickers on the boxes at BB that correct the drive speed labels to 5400 from 7200.
I read that the 7200 won't even ship till March or so.

tooki · Dec 19, 2004, 12:06 PM

Originally posted by bighead:
When he was installing the drive into his friend's 867 MHz TiBook yesterday, I couldn't believe that the drive was a slimline model. I suspected that it would be a 12.5mm drive, but it sure looked like a 9.5mm one. Didn't measure it though.

Of course it's a 9.5mm drive: nobody has made notebook drives thicker than that for years now. Probably because every notebook made in the past few years only has room in it for the 9.5mm drives.

(The only 2.5" drives I know of that are thicker are the Seagate Savvio drives, which are not notebook drives, but rather are compact server drives. They don't have ATA interfaces anyway, so you couldn't run them on a notebook anyway.)

tooki

bighead · Dec 27, 2004, 04:00 PM

Well, I got the RMA drive really fast. NewEgg is seriously awesome in the customer service department.

I installed the new drive last Friday, and I wanted to run it through the wringer before posting anything about it. The drive was much cooler and quieter when zeroing it on the FireWire bridge than the first (dead) one. Got it into the 15" and successfully partitioned it and installed OS X. Restoring all of my data, setting up the new user, and installing all of the applications took only a few hours. Raw transfers are noticeably faster, are disk-heavy apps like Photoshop. Boot time is shorter, though I don't have any hard numbers. I'd be willing to run Xbench if anyone is interested.

As with my friend's friend and his new Seagate, with a properly functioning drive, it works pretty nice. It's a far cry faster than the original Fujitsu drive, and the extra space is quite nice. As long as Seagate can keep the quality and reliability on these drives up (and I've not heard of any other failures aside from mine online) it looks like Seagate will become a real competitor in the notebook drive market.

On a side note, I'm almost tempted to buy another PowerBook or iBook just so I can put a Western Digital Scorpio drive in it, since they have also entered the notebook drive market recently. If these two major drive makers can give Hitachi, Toshiba, and Fujitsu a scare, the market will definitely benefit. I'm looking forward to all of these new mechanisms.

Drakino · Dec 27, 2004, 05:33 PM

The 7200 RPM was a misprint on the boxes, Seagate has yet to release the 100GB 7200 drives. I bought one anyhow for the portable Wintendo box, and am pondering another for the Powerbook. That way I have 20 gigs more free space and a faster RPM drive over the stock 4200.

Talking to Seagate about the misprint, they said it is likely the new drives will be out sometime this spring.