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vanishing notebook ide drives

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by wxtomb

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I want to replace the hard drive in my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. I figured I'd get better performance by buying a 7200 rpm, 2.5 inch, IDE. No Can Do, They're all discontinued or out of stock. Sure, they have plenty of SATA drives, or a few with 5600 rpm spindle speeds. Seagate and Hitachi still mention them in their product listings, but they are nowhere to be found...at least by me. Anyone know what's going on?

14 replies

by mamies

Sata drives are a faster drives and more and more people are migrating to them. IDE seems to become less and less common as computers are upgraded (yet they do exist).

But my best bet to find a drive like that would be ebay. I have done a few searches and havent come up with much it keeps pointing me to 3.5 inch IDE drives

Hope ebay can deliver

by older mycroft

So your quest for a 7200rpm 2.5 inch IDE drive is basically pointless.

There are two factors to consider here:

#1 The use that this drive will be put to. Unless you will be constantly running an SQL Database with thousands of small files within the database, the increased rotational speed will be practically unnoticeable in everyday use.

#2 The increased rotational speed is thermo-dynamic, so it will inevitably generate increased heat by comparison to your existing, slower drive. There is a strong possibility that the chassis layout of your 8200 might have difficulty with heat dissipation, resulting in impaired overall performance.

If you want to make a gain when you replace the existing hard drive, you would be better to buy an increased capacity hard drive, but leave the rotational speed (heat generation) the same. ;)

by oh smeg

But with more Cache on it. This will appear to be faster for most data writes & reads than one with less Cache. The rotational speeds do very little for HDD Speed if they did the 15K SCSI's that come in the Servers would be blindingly fast which they are not.

Also while you are at it use a Cool Pad like this

http://tinyurl.com/ny8zn

They draw very little power and increase the life of the NB by making it run considerably cooler and it sucks in less dust to block things up.

Col

by wxtomb

I gave in and bought a 160G 5400 rpm Seagate (with 5 year warrantee). I would still like to know why all of the 7600's dried up!

Thanks to all that replied.

by oh smeg

So there is no demand for them at retail outlets.

As stated above the faster speed drives run hotter than the slower speed ones do and if you fit the faster RPM Drives you get problems.

After a bout of failed Drives or other problems that the retailers got hit with they just didn't see the need of the problems associated with these drives.

Of course if there where no SATA Drives being used it would be a different story. :D

Col

by wxtomb

It has been stated in earlier posts that 7200 rpm drives run hotter, which causes problems for the NB. So, what did the manufacturers do to make the 7200 rpm SATA versions acceptable? Did they change to magically cooler running motors? If so, the obvious answer would be to retrofit the 7200 rpm IDE drives with those cooler alternatives.

So, assuming the extra heat isn't caused by the mechanical part of the drive, one would have to assume that it is being produced by the interface...maybe IDE runs hotter than SATA for the same volume of data tranfer. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that serial data transfer (SATA) is a faster way of doing things than parallel (PATA)!

I've used 7200 rpm IDE drives in my laptops for years and never had a problem. The performance was noticeably improved, allowing the operating system to boot quicker as well as faster starting applications. The manufacturers (notably Hitachi and Seagate) still show these drives on their websites. You just can't buy them anymore!

by bk1279

the 7200 rpm drives do run hotter. the reason why they make more 7200 sata's versus the ide's is because the newer laptops with sata are designed with better venting or heat distribution so it compensates for the extra heat of the 7200 rpms. the older laptops with ide 4200 or 5400 rpms might overheat with a 7200 drive.

by wxtomb

Thanks for your post Peconet, I clicked on the above link to newegg's website. Every one of those IDE drives are 5400 rpm (well except for the Fujitsu which was 4200 rpm). So, which model did you see that was 2.5inch, 7200 rpm and IDE? They do not have any that I could find!

by Former member

I have them in my computer and (unless you do a speed check on all of your drives), there are no differences that you can see Not on a laptop anyway. This gives you a big PLUS because they do not pull so much electric so in practice it should make your laptop go for longer (depending on what you use it for though).
Just a though.

Please post back if you have any more problems or questions.

by wxtomb

I went to that shopping.com link and saw 3 drives, none of them fit the bill:

ST980825AS is SATA
ST980815A is 5400rpm
MK1637GSX is 5400rpm

by wxtomb

I apologize, I didn't scroll down far enough. Discount Technology actually says that they have two, the Hitachi E7K60 08K0889, and the Seagate ST96023A. Both 60Gig drives and only $200! As I stated earlier, I broke down and bought a 5400 Seagate. Nicely done!

So, the 7200 rpm ide drives didn't vanish, they're just very hard to find and going for premium prices.

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