Smaller-sized HDD?

[mrwho]

Will a Ricoh machine work with a smaller HDD than the one it came originally (let's say, a 40Gb HDD in a machine that came originally with a 80Gb)?

Cheers!

[unisys12]

If you look in the Detailed Description area of the service, that address the controller, you will find that sometimes it will tell you. Pretty vagu though. Most of the time it's like, "... at least a 80gig SATA hard drive must be used."

General rule for me though... I won't put a smaller drive in.

[zyqwiz]

A smaller drive will me more expensive though!

[mrwho]

The idea is to put a 32Gb SSD instead of a standard HD. It's more expensive, yes, but much less prone to malfunctions - namely for those customers whose machines already go on their 3rd or 4th HD so far.

[Vulkor]

Hmm wonder if those handle the same way. I know there are TWO TYPES of Solid State Drives. One that formats with windows normally, and one that requires a special utility. Think you want the Intel Drive if you are gonna test this on a copier.

[unisys12]

Also keep in mind that some SSD's are slower than standard spin drives. From what I've read, there are utilies that you can load on XP NetBooks (which are starting to pop up alot) that increase the performance on these drives. But I have also read where others have seen great performance increases by moving over to SSD's. But the newer one's are really expensive. Just be sure to compare read and write speeds.

We had an older model that one of the techs accidentlly grabbed an older 20 gig drive and put it in a new MFP that uses a 80g and it wouldn't work.

$40 for a drive from TigerDirect doesn't sound that bad to me, compared to $195 for a PATA 16g SSD and $80 for a 30g SATAII SDD after a $40 rebate.

{EDIT}

Checked some SATA drive specs just to compare -

• SSD SATA, 30g, 2.5" OCZ Agility Series 30GB Solid State Drive - 2.5", SATA II at TigerDirect.com
  • Writer Speed - up to 100 MB/sec
  • Read Speed - up to 185 MB/sec

• Standard SATA3, 7200RPM, 8MB Buffer, Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 80GB Hard Drive - 7200, 8MB, SATA-300, OEM at TigerDirect.com
  • Data Transfer Rate - Up to 3000 MB/sec
  • Avg Latency - 4.16 msec

{/EDIT}

[Shadow1]

That 3000MB/s is what's called a burst speed - its the transfer speed from the internal cache memory through the interface. The sustained read speed is going to be MUCH lower - the SSD will have it beat. Its write speed on the solid state drives you have to watch - read / write performance on a mechanical drive is fairly symetrical, but SSD's have to read, erase, then rewrite entire sections of memory, so the performance is good if your replacing the entire block, but sux if you update a few bytes in a bunch of different blocks. That's where the better drives with better cache controllers come into play.
You also need to remember that SSD's are only good for so many write cycles before they give up - spindle drives don't care. In a laptop its not a big factor - once the OS and programs are loaded there is very little written to the drive (except the paging file but there's ways around that) Not so on a copier, every page scaned writes to the drive