[narlus]

my toshiba satellite HD finally died, after a close call about a year ago (it miraculously healed itself. uch: ).

so, after looking around it appears that a drive would cost me about $150 + shipping. this notebook was bought in late '02 and looks like from completed ebay sales that good working condition units can fetch about $300 or so...hell, even a unit w/o a processor or hard drive got $250.

so i am thinking about just dumping this sucker on ebay and buying a new one.

thoughts?

 

[binary visions]

Depends if you feel like you're in a place where you want to dump all the money into a new laptop.

Outpost.com has a Western Digital 80gb drive for $100:

http://shop4.outpost.com/product/4413716

...but laptops are generally fragile creatures. They don't have the lifespan of desktops. My Dell from 01 is working just fine but I'm pretty careful with it.

If there's room in the budget for a new laptop, I wouldn't wait for the next component to die on this one.

 

[narlus]

that's a very good price, but are you sure that is compatible w/ my machine? it's been very confusing to find out what drives are compatible.

plus, i can't remove the broken yet, because for some reason Toshiba decided that tiny torx bolts were a good idea, just on the drive :angry:

the memory and cdr drives have regular philips heads. bastards

 

[Toshi]

unless your machine needs some sort of extra-low-profile drive any old 2.5" ide drive should slot right in.

that said, wait a month or three and get an intel ibook when it's released . come to the dark side...

 

[Ciaran]

unless your machine needs some sort of extra-low-profile drive any old 2.5" ide drive should slot right in.

that said, wait a month or three and get an intel ibook when it's released . come to the dark side...

Ack! Don't listen to him! LALALALALALALA! I am not listening to you, Toshi! LALALALALA!!!!!

But in all seriousness, Toshi is right about the drive. Any old 2.5 should fit. But if the laptop is older and you have the fundage I would get a new laptop. I mean, who doesn't love new toys!?

I personally run a Compaq Evo N600c. For me it's almost perfect. P3, 1ghz, 500megs of RAM. Since I only use it to surf Ridemonkey on the road and to play my music in my car (via a cassette adapter) it is more than I need. I am thinking of selling it (and another one I have) and getting a smaller laptop. I would love to have one with a 12 inch screen because portability and convenience are my number one and two criteria when choosing a laptop.

 

[Pau11y]

I had a chance to play w/ a Dell m700 when I was repairing machines. They're very nice and small. But since I'm used to a larger keyboard (naturals are spaced wider than standard KBs), the smallish one on the m700 caused me to double hit keys. It was very nice tho, and played DVDs very proficiently (I like movies vs. music).

Oh, BV, I'm on the Os now... I'll keep you posted...

 

[binary visions]

Dells are about the cheapest machines running right now. With their constant coupon codes that are posted and occasional screaming deals that crop up, you can often get a pretty nice machine for $700-800.

No rush in the slightest, Pau11y...

 

[narlus]

got an HP pavilion for $700 today...seemed like a good machine for the $. hopefully i can get $250 for the dead toshiba.

 

[pixelninja]

got an HP pavilion for $700 today...seemed like a good machine for the $. hopefully i can get $250 for the dead toshiba.

Hope you have better luck with your HP Pavilion than I've had. Mine's just over a year old and I've sent it back to HP twice. Both times they had to replace the motherboard because the integrated video card went bad. Twice. I'm a little scared because its now out of warranty.

 

[narlus]

ugh, just saw that note re: Pavilion...maybe i should have gotten the 3 year warranty.

anyway, would this hard drive be a decent one to rescusitate my dead toshiba?

http://www.computergiants.com/items/one_item.asp?part=64062&aff=14

 

[binary visions]

Not sure why you'd go with a 20gb drive for $65, when you could have:

40gb for $60 if you want to do it cheaply:
http://shop3.outpost.com/product/3812467

Or a much higher performance 40gb drive (5400rpm, 8mb buffer) if you want, for $90:
http://shop3.outpost.com/product/4672238

Or a high performance 40gb drive for $80 but only a 90 day warranty:
http://www.surpluscomputers.com/store/main.aspx?p=ItemDetail&item=DRV10535

 

[narlus]

huh, i thought it was a $60GB drive...thanks for the other links. i guess my main question was that a 'notebook, 2.5" HDD' should work w my toshiba, eh? are they kinda like one size fits all?

 

[pixelninja]

huh, i thought it was a $60GB drive...thanks for the other links. i guess my main question was that a 'notebook, 2.5" HDD' should work w my toshiba, eh? are they kinda like one size fits all?

You should be able to put any internal 2.5" drive into your Toshiba.

 

[binary visions]

huh, i thought it was a $60GB drive...thanks for the other links. i guess my main question was that a 'notebook, 2.5" HDD' should work w my toshiba, eh? are they kinda like one size fits all?

Yep.

Just looking at a speed difference. Higher RPMs = faster but runs hotter. And, obviously, more cache is faster.

Desktop drives are pretty much "one size fits all" if you think about it. The difference being now you have SATA drives.

There are SATA drives available for laptops, too, but they're not as common yet.

 

[syadasti]

You could have gotten a 7200 RPM 8MB 2.5" notebook HDD too - would reduce one of the main laptop bottlenecks and pep it up.

When I got my Mini I never used it in stock form, I ripped it open, removed the crappy HDD and slapped a blade server(blade server HDDs have longer MTBF ratings than notebook) 2.5" 7200RPM 8MB HDD and 1 GB memory stick

 

[syadasti]

Yep.

Just looking at a speed difference. Higher RPMs = faster but runs hotter. And, obviously, more cache is faster.

The newer 2.5" 7200 RPM drives run cooler than most older 4200/5400 RPM designs due to new bearing designs and other tricks...

 

[binary visions]

The newer 2.5" 7200 RPM drives run cooler than most older 4200/5400 RPM designs due to new bearing designs and other tricks...

Well, sure, but if you're looking at two new drives...

 

[syadasti]

Well, sure, but if you're looking at two new drives...

I ebay'd the extra HDD and 512MB memory stick

 

[narlus]

this is gonna be a low usage laptop, mainly used to either stream music to my stereo, but also to rip vinyl to data. speed isn't much of a concern.

 

[syadasti]

this is gonna be a low usage laptop, mainly used to either stream music to my stereo, but also to rip vinyl to data. speed isn't much of a concern.

For ripping/encoding speed and high quality streaming it would...

 

[binary visions]

For ripping/encoding speed and high quality streaming it would...

I've done a pretty good amount of music ripping, and if that's all you're using it for at a given time, HDD speed isn't exactly a limiting factor. I ripped my whole music collection on my old computer on one of those horrible Bigfoot drives. You couldn't touch the damn thing while it was working, of course, but the hard drive speed was fine.

 

[syadasti]

I've done a pretty good amount of music ripping, and if that's all you're using it for at a given time, HDD speed isn't exactly a limiting factor. I ripped my whole music collection on my old computer on one of those horrible Bigfoot drives. You couldn't touch the damn thing while it was working, of course, but the hard drive speed was fine.

It still helps though. The biggest bottleneck is your CDROM drive, but memory and HDD are also bottlenecks. You have to buffer the CD while its being copied from the CD to the HDD and then encoded as mp3.

Its best to make sure your HDD is defragmented too.

Over the course of converting your entire collection it will make a significant time difference to have the computer setup right...

 

[narlus]

not a big deal for me...i'd only be doing a few things at a time, and the biggest CPU drain is for normalizing/reducing noise via CoolEdit....i did have an old 770X Thinkpad in for this duty, so anything will be a speed improvement.

depending on the speed of compression, i could always just transfer it to my desktop via my G-wireless setup and compress it there, if that's any faster.

 

[syadasti]

not a big deal for me...i'd only be doing a few things at a time, and the biggest CPU drain is for normalizing/reducing noise via CoolEdit....i did have an old 770X Thinkpad in for this duty, so anything will be a speed improvement.

depending on the speed of compression, i could always just transfer it to my desktop via my G-wireless setup and compress it there, if that's any faster.

If its just a secondary computer not used much, a slower HDD is no big deal.

A wireless network would be a major bottleneck compared to a HDD...

 

[narlus]

oh yeah, and the audio streaming part would also be via wireless network. i was kinda on the fence about either rehabbing this laptop, or selling it for what i could and buying another squeezebox. the main advantage of that is the remote; the main disadvantage is that i would still have to use the Thinkpad (which has a tiny hard drive and is very slow, but what do you expect from a laptop from '99 or so) for my vinyl rips.

 

[narlus]

ok, i've not yet got around to reviving my dead laptop, but now that my AV receiver should be back next week, i'm gonna have to move my squeezebox back to that system.

so, what do people think about this drive:

http://tinyurl.com/j2xh7