IBM 600e laptop HDD troubles

[exodus454]

Had the original travelstar hard drive fail today and i'm looking for a replacement..

would it make any sense to put a 7200rpm drive in it? does it even support it? I cant find any sites that give you HDD compatibility lists, just original specs..

any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[DaveSimmons]

Heat could be a problem unless you get one that's cool running. Check newegg or you might google "IIBM 600e 7200 RPM" and see if you find something.

If your laptop is a P2.P3 or Celeron under 1 GHz it might have a BIOS that's so old it only supports drives up to 30 GB.

Aside from the above, 7200 RPM will work fine.

 

[exodus454]

yeah its only 400mhz.. at that speed would the faster access times really make much of a difference?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Probably not, adding RAM would help more than 7200 RPM up to a point (probably 256 MB total RAM for 98/ME and typical apps).

 

[tiap]

Should work with the latest 600 bios update. Heat should not be a problem, tests have shown that the new travelstar 7200rpm run even cooler than the 4500 or 5200 models.
In case your interested the hitachi 80 gig5200rpm tests realisitically as fast as the 60 gig 7200 rpm.

 

[exodus454]

hmm.. in that case, has anyone yet figured out how to do a bios update without a floppy?

 

[tiap]

You can make a bootable cd with the floppy iso.
Go here and search for the specific directions.

 

[exodus454]

thats the problem, I havnt been able to find a floppy ISO.. only the stupid per-update floppy creation program that ibm distributes

 

[tiap]

go to that site