1.8" hard drive with side connection problem

mlmcelligott

Hi I have an IBM thinkpad x41 and I need to replace the harddrive in it. I thought sourcing a harddrive for it would be easy but its not so simple. Firstly it uses a 1.8" format but aswell as that the connections are on the side of the hard drive and not the top of it as usual.

At the moment there is an 8Gb solid state drive in it with a pata interface on the side of the drive which works fine but its not enough storage for what I need.

Can anyone help me find one or has anyone a broken x41 that I could buy the harddrive from?

Thanks

hugoline

Yup, they are a bit harder to find than the regular 2.5" drives.

Try eBay, there are a few from the US or Asia.

Otherwise replace the SSD with a bigger one from the KingSpec series (16, 32, 64 or 128GB available)

The form factor of this drive makes these drives a bit expensive...

mlmcelligott

hugoline wrote: »

Yup, they are a bit harder to find than the regular 2.5" drives.

Try eBay, there are a few from the US or Asia.

Otherwise replace the SSD with a bigger one from the KingSpec series (16, 32, 64 or 128GB available)

The form factor of this drive makes these drives a bit expensive...

A bit expensive!!! How about a regualar harddrive? Can they still be got?

massy086

dont the old ipods use 1.8" drive,s might be a idea they went all the way up to 160gig if im not wrong just an idea

mlmcelligott

mlmcelligott wrote: »

A bit expensive!!! How about a regualar harddrive? Can they still be got?

Mechanical 1.8" drives were/are nearly exclusively 4200rpm and are cripplingly slow. That is if you can even find one! Other option is to get a 1.8" ssd which at any decent capacity worth upgrading to will cost the earth. Id get a new netbook as it will cost similiar to ssd and perform better than your thinkpad.

hugoline

massy086 wrote: »

dont the old ipods use 1.8" drive,s might be a idea they went all the way up to 160gig if im not wrong just an idea

Won't work, although they use the same plug and format (PATA 1.8") on the X40, X41 the connector is on the side of the drive

mlmcelligott wrote: »

A bit expensive!!! How about a regualar harddrive? Can they still be got?

I remember looking it up before and lenovo was quite a bit more expensive for the mechanical drives...

As I said, ebay... from Asia or a few from the US. Unfortunatley not to many available in Europe (used ones do pop up from time to time...check out ebay.de as well)

Otherwise boot from an external USB drive, or use the 8GB SSD you have now in combination with a 32GB SD for documents, ...

hugoline

david7536 wrote: »

Id get a new netbook as it will cost similiar to ssd and perform better.

My X40 is well over 7 years old and beats the crap out of any netbook I have seen so far (was quite surprised to see that my self). Start-up is a bit slower (hence thinking of switching to SSD myself) but working/ editing files and especially with flash stuff from the web it is quite a bit faster than the Atom powered netbooks. Additionaly, the build-quality of the netbooks don't even come close to the X30/40/60 lenovo series.

Solitaire

hugoline wrote: »

My X40 is well over 7 years old and beats the crap out of any netbook I have seen so far (was quite surprised to see that my self). Start-up is a bit slower (hence thinking of switching to SSD myself) but working/ editing files and especially with flash stuff from the web it is quite a bit faster than the Atom powered netbooks. Additionaly, the build-quality of the netbooks don't even come close to the X30/40/60 lenovo series.

A warning all should heed - A low-TDP 1GHz Pentium 3 beats the arse off an 1.6GHz Atom with 4 virtual cores. Lol. Just. Lol.

mlmcelligott

Didnt think of using an sd card as a hard drive. How stable would a 32gig sd card be? Are they expensive?

hugoline

mlmcelligott wrote: »

How stable would a 32gig sd card be?

If you only use it for storing data (and not for the OS) I wouldn't see much of a problem (similar wear and tear as in digital cameras I would imagine). Backup any important stuff regularly as ususal

mlmcelligott wrote: »

Are they expensive?

I guess for your budget yes - cheaper than the SSDs quoted above, but only a small bit

Check out the shops mentioned in this thread

Solitaire

They'll be dirt-slow depending on the X41's card reader. Does it support Class 10? If so you should go with a pricier card but the performance would be far superior. If not you can cheap out in the knowledge that anything you get is going to be pretty slow

A 16GB card can cost €30-35 normally or €35-45 for a high-speed model. 32GB cards are pricey though - €80+ for even a normal Class 6 (and no cheaper for the low-speed variants - avoid!). I've seen very few Class 10 32GB units myself; the ones I have seen are close to €200 :eek:

And I haven't even seen any sIDE HDDs for the X4* out there. I've seen a range of adaptors so you can use a 1.8" ZIF HDD... but I haven't seen any of them either! :rolleyes:

hugoline

Solitaire wrote: »

They'll be dirt-slow depending on the X41's card reader.

Absolutely right in that point, IIRC on my X40 it did max out for an sc6 card (about 6.2MB/sec transfer for bigger files) but I doubt it will go much higher

(others have found that changing the driver will increase the speed)

Saying that, the 4200rpm HDD isn't much faster :rolleyes:

It really all depends what you want to do with the computer and how much you want to spend. For the odd word document surfing the web or watching a movie, the SD card option should be OK. For frequent and fast file access (picture editing, ...) I would definitely replace the HDD (and probably spend the money for an SSD)


60Gb HDD with ZIF adapter for less than 60 Euro delivered. This is the best deal I could find so far for an old style HDD (the same guy sells ZIF adaptors separately as well)

There is also loads of info about HDD replacement over on the thinkpads forum

Solitaire wrote: »

A low-TDP 1GHz Pentium 3 beats the arse off an 1.6GHz Atom with 4 virtual cores. Lol. Just. Lol.

Ok, I 'slightly' exaggerated , sorry (No expert here, just reporting my experience)

My X40 and the OPs X41 are powered by a Pentium M @ 1.5/1.6 GHz respectively (Pentium 3 is a few more years back), and according (for what it's worth) to cpubenchmark.net they are both faster than the 1.6 GHz Atom. Additionally the different chipsets probably behave slightly different.

hugoline

hugoline wrote: »

My X40 is well over 7 years old and beats the crap out of any netbook I have seen so far (was quite surprised to see that my self). Start-up is a bit slower (hence thinking of switching to SSD myself) but working/ editing files and especially with flash stuff from the web it is quite a bit faster than the Atom powered netbooks. Additionaly, the build-quality of the netbooks don't even come close to the X30/40/60 lenovo series.

You are joking about the performance,right? Build quality is obviously going to be better than todays semi-disposable netbooks.

hugoline wrote: »

Ok, I 'slightly' exaggerated , sorry (No expert here, just reporting my experience)

My X40 and the OPs X41 are powered by a Pentium M @ 1.5/1.6 GHz respectively (Pentium 3 is a few more years back), and according (for what it's worth) to cpubenchmark.net they are both faster than the 1.6 GHz Atom. Additionally the different chipsets probably behave slightly different.

According to your link:

CPU Type............................... Passmark CPU Mark (higher is better)

Intel Pentium M 1600MHz................363
Intel Atom 330 @ 1.60GHz...............631


And yes that is the Atom that is used in the vast majority of netbooks on the market now. k?

Op, imo best option is to save for new machine or pay over the odds for a hdd, mechanical or ssd, that will disapoint either in terms of speed or cost respectively

hugoline

Sorry, my bad.
All I could compare at the time were single core Atoms. And that would explain it. Thanks

Solitaire

hugoline wrote: »

Absolutely right in that point, IIRC on my X40 it did max out for an sc6 card (about 6.2MB/sec transfer for bigger files) but I doubt it will go much higher

(others have found that changing the driver will increase the speed)

Saying that, the 4200rpm HDD isn't much faster :rolleyes:

You'd be surprised - the lower rotational speed of the 1.8" HDDs is offset a bit by the smaller platters so its not like a 4200rpm desktop drive or something! A Class 6 card would be okay so long as you "did an X-Fi" and hacked them drivers good. But performance is going to be abysmal compared to the HDD... there's clearly major issues with the card reader model used on the X-series. What was that about build quality?

Ok, I 'slightly' exaggerated , sorry (No expert here, just reporting my experience)

My X40 and the OPs X41 are powered by a Pentium M @ 1.5/1.6 GHz respectively (Pentium 3 is a few more years back), and according (for what it's worth) to cpubenchmark.net they are both faster than the 1.6 GHz Atom. Additionally the different chipsets probably behave slightly different.

Actually... those CPUs are modded P3s. P4 was so utterly dire it made little impact on the mobile market before P3 went straight to C2D. For an example an enhanced mobile P3 (Pentium M) had an average performance advantage of 50% per clock cycle over a Pentium 4. So a 1.6GHz Dothan was equivalent to a 2.4GHz P4 Bear in mind those plucky modded P3s eventually became the Core2 CPU :P

AFAIK the old X40 is based on a 1GHz Banias and the X41 on 1.5GHz or higher Dothan (these are the ultra-mobile LV variants, thus the low clock speeds) Given that an Atom is a stripped-down Frankenstein hybrid of the Pentium 4 and Pentium, er, 1 (with the worst characteristics of both!) with the worst combination of in-order processing and long execution pipeline (the first being anathema to modern computing and the second exacerbating the first issue) and has the old naff P4-style HyperThreading implemetation (painting go-faster stripes on a snail's shell) a 1GHz Pentium M could quite easily outperform a 1.6GHz Atom N330 :P And Passmark (and many synthetics besides) can't really show how bad the Atoms are, mostly as they pander to its poor HT implementation and archaic in-order execution which is the biggest real-world performance issue.

God, Atom reminds me of GM cereal crops and fail. Both were originally meant to improve the standard of living in third-world countries (Atom was never meant to appear outside a PDA or mobile in the developed world!). Both were designed by unforgivably stupid and greedy semi-monopolies, and both ended up crop-dusting the developed world in an explosion of fail and lowering our standard of living rather than the exact opposite they were supposed to have done

mlmcelligott

nice to see ive started a good debate here. We've gone a little off topic though. since i started this thread i've bought a 1.8" 80GB SAMSUNG HS082HB HDD with an adapter so its fits the x41. the guy selling it on ebay claimed it "could work with an x41" but after testing it sadly it doesn't

So im back to the start again. does anyone out there have a broken x41 thrown in the attack or garage anywhere with a good hard drive? I'll gladly pay you for an original hard drive that i just cant find anywhere.