7200rpm notebook hard drive

tahlsr

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Mar 8, 2003
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Hi all,
I was hoping someone could tell me what's going on.

I work for IBM and am getting a new laptop (T41).
The model I'm getting comes with a 5400RPM hard drive
but I convinced my manager to order me a 7200RPM hard drive
because I firmly believe that the hard drive is a severe bottleneck
in this system.
The hard drive I was able to order is a:
Sigma Data 60GB, 7200RPM Hard Drive

I have never heard of this brand nor do I know anymore specifications. Can anyone tell me if they think this will be as good as the Hitachi 7200rpm notebook hard drive? Any other comments regarding the desire to upgrade my laptop to have a 7200RPM drive?

Is it possible that this drive will not be faster than the 5400RPM drive that normally comes with the T41?

Thanks for any input/comments.
 

tahlsr

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bottlenceck for system performance. Specifically with the hard drive, loading all programs and the general responsiveness. I'm a java developer and do quite a bit of multitasking throughout the day with large applications. My impression has always been that a fast boot drive leads to better system responsiveness and faster loading of any program that isn't completely cached in RAM. I have found that anytime you upgrade to a faster hard drive (assuming sufficient amounts of RAM to avoid swapping all the time) that the computer just feels quite a bit quicker. This is what I want with my laptop. I have a SCSI 15k drive for my boot drive on my home computer and everything always feels so slick. Thanks.
 
The 7200 RPM drive will be an improvement, however, its obviusly never going to be what your SCSI drive is, or what your desktop is.

The Hitachi drive may be slightly faster (Hitachi makes some good drives), however even if it is just barely faster, I don't think you are going to notice the difference.

IBM obvisuly wouldn't give you a junk drive. I wouldn't worry about it.

My Desktop: <A HREF="http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc.html" target="_new">http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc.html</A>
Overclocking Results: <A HREF="http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc2.html" target="_new">http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc2.html</A>
 

tahlsr

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Mar 8, 2003
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I'm ok with using lots of battery juice. Most of my day is spent using a docking station (with laptop plugged in). The hard drive got here today so I'll see how it rips. I'm pretty much only into performance and always thought faster boot drives were well worth the investment which usually is only a few dollars more.
 

blah

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diff: 7200 vs 5400 is too little to worry about, while 5400 vs 4200 is huge.

PS: they all have ~same battery life span.


..this is very useful and helpful place for information...
 

sjonnie

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Oct 26, 2001
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bottlenceck for system performance
The hard drive is only really a bottleneck when windows tries to access the bloody page file. I recommend you install 2 hard drives, one for OS + backups and one for the pagefile + DATA etc. This means that when you click on Photoshop and windows decides it needs to page 100MB out to disk it doesn't try and do both things from the same disk at the same time - arghh! Having 1G basic memory and turning off kernel paging is a good start as well. Mind you, this is a bloody laptop so probably none of those things are an option.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=114979" target="_new">My PCs</A> :cool: