Thread: Whats the big difference? Whats better? Hard Drives

Originally Posted by EsKALad

ok ive only dealt with 7200 rpm hard drives, unfortunately all fullsize. im thinking about going with a 80 or 100 gig lappy drive. should i go with 7200 or 5400 or 4200. i know the speeds is different, but whats the big difference? give me your insight guys, im pretty sure alot of you know more on this topic than me.

Long story short - get the fastest you can afford.

I just bought three of those WalMart Black Friday notebooks and the forums about them said there are three areas for improvement on them: faster harddrive, more/faster memory, faster processor. Memory is a given (unless you use hibernate) - fastest your motherboard can handle the more the merrier. Hard drive I hadn't immediately considered except for more storage, but the truth is many people say the percieved speed increase from a 4200 to a 7200 is more noticeable than increasing the memory. Has to do with the use of virtual memory and read speed of the drives. As far as processor swaps, I'm happy with the memory and new hard drive (its not like I'm trying to play WOW or BF2) just mp3s, nav, and an occasional movie.

I upgraded my CarPC drives to 7200 a while back and it is noticeable faster.

Microsoft did a test comparing boot times. The faster the drive, the faster you can recover from a boot. Problem isthat the faster the drive spins, the more power it needs.

yeah but thats only 5v rail. i have extra to spare on that. i only have like 4 usb devices and a slim slot load drive. so should i do 7200 rpm drive? im thinking now between the 80 or 100 gig.

3.5" drives (standard desktop HDD) pull form 5v as well as the 12v rail.
A 2.5" laptop drive should only pull from the 5v rail.

i know that dp. the fullsize uses a molex connector which is both 12v and 5v. but were talking about lappy hdds.

Should have read the original post. Sorry about that.

It's been a loooong week.

You want the Travelstar 7K100 or the Momentus 7200.1:
http://www.storagereview.com/article...otebook_3.html
With laptop drives, power, noise and heat are not going to be an issue.

Avoid the 1st gen 7K60, because the performance is only as good as a newer 5400RPM drive.

yeah looks good. i found some for like 300 bucks

ok im thinking the 250 to 300 range is alot for a damn hard drive. you think theres a huge difference between the 5400 and 7200 drives?