7200rpm 2.5" Drives

stoofa · 29 Jun 2007 at 12:08

I've just been doing a few little upgrades on my laptop.
With memory prices at a nice low I invested in 2x 1GB DDR2 modules for it.
I am looking at CPU options, however I don't think that will be viable.
The supplied HD was a 2.5", SATA, 4200rpm Toshiba unit - 80GB.
I was looking at maybe getting something a little larger and faster too.

It's really a choice between 120GB of Seagate with the 7200rpm or around 200GB of Western Digital at 5400rpm.
How well are the 7200rpm units performing?
Do they eat up battery life as I suspect them to or are they OK?

Ta

brendy · 29 Jun 2007 at 12:17

my HP nc6320 uses an 80gb 7200 drive, to be honest it still searches quite a bit, id not waste the money for unnoticeable differences.
I went and upped my 1gb ram by removing one 512mb and treplacing it with a 1gb stick, runs vista business happily now. If you are running vista or are thinking of changing up, get a usb2 512mb stick instead of changing the hdd as itll speed up your system better than the extra rpm of a hdd using readyboost.

stoofa · 29 Jun 2007 at 13:03

I've kept the laptop running WinXP.
I know it will take Vista, especially now it's got 2GB RAM.
However I've still got a couple of applications that aren't happy under Vista (which I run on my main system) so leaving the laptop on XP is cleaner to me than dual-booting.

The 80GB drive that came with the laptop is starting to fill-up a little bit, so the upgrade was more for space than anything.
If I'm not really going to notice that much from the 7200rpm upgrade I may well pay about the same price and get the 200GB WD drive.

It's storage I'm after more than anything, however if the 7200rpm units had been "stunning" performers I may have gone that route.

Ta

cavemanoc · 30 Jun 2007 at 12:30

I've just done the same with my Dell and replaced the old 5400rpm drive with the new Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HERE - Couldn't be happier - much quicker and has the best power usage in the industry - do it - do it now

ShakenNstirred · 1 Jul 2007 at 18:03

cavemanoc said:
I've just done the same with my Dell and replaced the old 5400rpm drive with the new Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HERE - Couldn't be happier - much quicker and has the best power usage in the industry - do it - do it now

same here mate i have just upgraded my laptop HDD`s from 5400rpm to 7200 rpm drives(Seagate Momentus 120gig x2)
stoofa as your running only a 4200rpm drive, you should see a very worth while improvement in boot up time and running.
i did going from 5400 - 7200 rpm drives

fobose · 1 Jul 2007 at 18:12

Thats a lot of money for such a small amount of space though! My laptops 40gb 4300rpm (I think) drive books insanely quick, about 10x faster than my PC lol.

brendy · 3 Jul 2007 at 19:34

ShakenNstirred said:
same here mate i have just upgraded my laptop HDD`s from 5400rpm to 7200 rpm drives(Seagate Momentus 120gig x2)
stoofa as your running only a 4200rpm drive, you should see a very worth while improvement in boot up time and running.
i did going from 5400 - 7200 rpm drives

Did you ghost or install fresh? Fresh installs will always boot faster. Part of windows booting doesnt even involve the hdd churning, loading stuff to memory etc so memory goes a longer way towards faster booting and general running.

ShakenNstirred · 4 Jul 2007 at 15:55

brendy said:
Did you ghost or install fresh? Fresh installs will always boot faster. Part of windows booting doesnt even involve the hdd churning, loading stuff to memory etc so memory goes a longer way towards faster booting and general running.

i used true image.
as for the "loading stuff to memory" were do you think it gets the stuff to load in to the ram, yep off the HDD.
the faster the drive ,the faster it can get the stuff in to the ram