Hard drive suggestions?

[Retired]

i just got my g73jh. what is a cheap but decent hardrive i should upgrade to boot from in the second bay?

[BrodyBoy]

Are you thinking HDD or SSD? For HDDs, I've always had good luck with Western Digitial, so I'm partial to them. But not rigidly so...they're probably more of a commodity than anything, so any name brand should be fine. (Asus installs Seagate and Western Digital interchangeably in their assemblies, if that's any help.)

[Retired]

if you're looking for SSD, be sure not to waste money on a sata 3 ssd. G73JH does not support sata 3. only sata 2 speeds.

[Boosted_R]

Brian@ASUS wrote:
if you're looking for SSD, be sure not to waste money on a sata 3 ssd. G73JH does not support sata 3. only sata 2 speeds.

What does the G74SX support?

[BrodyBoy]

The G74SX supports SATA 3. (For the HDDs...the ODD is SATA 2.)

[Retired]

Brian@ASUS wrote:
if you're looking for SSD, be sure not to waste money on a sata 3 ssd. G73JH does not support sata 3. only sata 2 speeds.

Good point although with SSDs, I consider them a long term investment (despite inherent wear issues). IMO, they'll last long enough to take to your next laptop and so you may want to consider SATA 3 for futureproofing. That said, SATA 2 SSD drives are already plenty darn fast and are one of the biggest improvements you can make to the performance of your computer. My Intel X-25m makes booting up and loading up programs like night and day.

[ScottinSoCal]

I'd also avoid the Seagate hybrid drives as a boot drive. There's been reports that the sleep mode causes stuttering and freezes on laptops when they're used as the OS drive. I have one I use as a data storage drive and it works great for that - fast transfer speeds and so far dead reliable.

[Retired]

i think it really depends how much you want to spend. $250 vs $500 on future proofing. that is if you get for example a intel 510 series...

but ssd will get cheaper and cheaper and i feel like if you are not going to take advantage of its performance now, it might be a waste of money. you're better off doing a raid setup with x2 sata2 ssd.

[Kipper]

I have tried both SATA II & III SSD's on this G74 and you will not notice any speed difference so save some cash and go with a nice SATA II. Unless you just have to have some bragging rights. LOL

[JRd1st]

Did you benchmark the drive speeds?