Notebook Hard Drive Upgrades?

[ArchStudent]

Howdy,

Just a quick one that I've been wondering about. My Dell Inspiron 600M came with a 30GB 4200rpm notebook HD, and after reading this review at Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20031031/index.html

It looks as though the Hitachi Travelstar7K60 (7200rpm and 8MB of cache) not only improves a system by about 15%, but also just barely affects the battery life as well. You get a speedier system and the battery performance is nearly identical

Now here is the thing, it seems as though the 4200rpm notebook hard drives use the ATA-5 interface, and the 7200rpm hard drives uses a ATA-6 interface.

Is it possible that the 7200rpm notebook hard drive will be compatible in my notebook, even though the interfaces are different? Does the interface dictate the maximum rate of transfer? I know that physically they are identical, and swap very easily.

 

[dnuggett]

THE ATA6 standard is compatible with the rest of the ATA series.

Here is the break down:

Data Transfer Rates:
ATA3 = up to 33mb / sec.
ATA4 = up to 66mb / sec
ATA5 = up to 100mb / sec
ATA6 = up to 133mb / sec

 

[kayatai]

ATA is backwards compatible it will just run at the slowest speed rated for the side.

ie if your mobo runs at ATA4 and HDD at ATA6, it will run at ATA4
likewise if your HDD runs at ATA4 and mobo can handle ATA6, it will run at ATA4

 

[jschuk]

Originally posted by: ArchStudent

Is it possible that the 7200rpm notebook hard drive will be compatible in my notebook, even though the interfaces are different? Does the interface dictate the maximum rate of transfer? I know that physically they are identical, and swap very easily.

As long as your unit doesn't have some kind of BIOS limitation in the size of the drive you will not have any problems, and I haven't run into any laptop limits other than the 524MB, 2.1GB, and 8.1GB limits. The ATA iterface dictates the maximum peak transfer rate from the HDD's cache memory. The HDD can prefetch data and transfer it from it's onboard memory at 133MB/s. However the maximum transfer rate from the media platters is 64.75MB/s (someone correct me if my math is wrong, max media transfer rate is 518Mb/s)
according to the specs.

 

[dnuggett]

As long as your unit doesn't have some kind of BIOS limitation in the size of the drive you will not have any problems, and I haven't run into any laptop limits other than the 524MB, 2.1GB, and 8.1GB limits.

ArchStudent- if this is confusing you, just ignore it. You have already told us you have a 600m.

 

[ArchStudent]

cool thanks for the info people.

I'm familiar with towers and Desktop PCs, but the information on laptops is kind of hard to come by at times.

I just replaced my tower with this laptop, and want to tweak it out as much as possible for software development and video editing I just pray that the interface is at least ATA 5 or 6