I decided to buy a new hard drive after I had run low on space, which I define as less than 10GB of free space, on my old drive. This would be second upgrade to my laptop. My last upgrade had been from 120GB to 160GB, both SATA 1.5Gbit/s at 5400RPM. (My 160GB would have been 3.0Gbit/s, but thanks to the lack of technical knowledge of HP's tech support, I was not sure if my computer could take it.) So this time I figured I better get more than I think I will need, so I will not have to upgrade again during my computer's lifetime.
After looking through prices of different manufacturers and their hard drives, I decided to go with a Western Digital (A somewhat biased decision) 320GB 7200RPM SATA3.0Gbit/s with a free-fall sensor (WD3200BJKT). (HP was able to tell me what I wanted to know after the second try this time.) Because I may drop my laptop one day, and the sensor only cost a little more compared to the one without. After ordering my hard drive online from provantage.com, it took only 3 days to arrive at my house.
Using a 2.5" external enclosure, I copied the contents from my old hard drive to my new one using Norton Ghost. However, while doing this I assigned the new drive's letter as H: in Vista, which turned out to be a dumb move. Once I had finished copying my old drive, I shut down my computer, took the old one out, and put the new one in. I turned on my computer and Vista boot up, but once it had, I ran into trouble. Vista would load almost nothing after its initial start, as everything was stored on C:, according to Windows, and I had marked my new drive as H:. I then spent the next three hours digging through my brain and futilely trying all I could think of to change the drive letter as it was assigned in Vista. I knew how to do so if I was given a command prompt, but I couldn't get one as Vista would search C: for explorer.exe and cmd.exe, and C: wasn't there. I finally decided I would try to copy my old drive again, giving Vista no knowledge of the new drives existence. I switched the drives in my computer and again copied my old drive to my new one using CloneZilla. When I started Vista with the new drive in again, it worked perfectly.
After feeling like an idiot by making a simple, but problematic mistake when coping my drive, I was ready to benchmark my new one against my old one. I had already benchmarked my old drive using PC Wizard 2008 and HD Tune, running both twice. I went ahead and benchmarked my new hard drive in the same way. All HD Tune benchmarks were done with Windows running in safe mode, to minimize other programs using the disk. I have posted the results below.
I have been using my new drive since the 24th, and I am very pleased with it and have found no problems, except the ones I caused. The speed increase is noticeable in everyday use, and having double the space I used to have is very liberating. Thank you Western Digital and provantage.com
Old:
HD Tune 1: http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/4142/1sthdtunebenchmarkwdcwdqa3.png
HD Tune 2: http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/9448/2ndhdtunebenchmarkwdcwdrs9.png
PC Wizard 1: http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/5872/old1ee5.png
PC Wizard 2: http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/4854/old2qv6.png
New:
HD Tune 1: http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/7852/1sthdtunebenchmarkwdcwdde0.png
HD Tune 2: http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/8168/2ndhdtunebenchmarkwdcwdav9.png
PC Wizard 1: http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/2391/new1ys3.png
PC Wizard 2: http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/8379/new2on3.png
No comments:
Post a Comment