7200rpm vs. 5400rpm laptop HDD question

www-jweather-com

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Ok... so according to Tom's charts for 2.5" HDD performance the performance really varies between models of hard drives. But what I need to know is this.... I have an 80gb 4200 rpm drive in my laptop right now. I need a new one because this one is getting bad sectors. So, I'm assuming that I will notice a big difference in the one I have now, and either the 5400 rpm or the 7200 rpm drive because either one I get will have an 8mb cache on it. (BTW -- these are PATA not SATA.)

So what I want to know is from anyone that's had real-world experience... not just the chart numbers. Will I really notice that big of a difference between the 7200 rpm vs the 5400 rpm drive? Reason I'm asking is for the same price I can get a significantly larger drive if I go 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm......I just want to get away from this slow-ass 4200 rpm drive!!!
 

heruur

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I recently when from a 4200RPM to a 7200RPM. OMG this thing is blazing fast, but a work of caution as my notebook area around the hard drive is reporting clocking in at 120F according to speedfan
 

fredygarza

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Going from 4200RPM to 7200RPM is a very noticeable upgrade you would notice right away. However first 4,200RPM drives had 2MB of Buffer Cache, newer 4200RPM had 8MB Buffer Cache.

5400RPM are speedy, but nothing beats the 7200RPM. I've owned 4,200RPM, 5400RPM and recently the Hitachi 7K100. The latter is extremely fast. Loading San Andreas is blazingly fast.

If you want to get the latest technology wait until summer where Hitachi would launch the 7K200 (200GB, even faster than the 7K100) with a part of the disk with flash memory so you could boot your machine faster! Expect to bag out 250USD for this drive. However the 7K100 is still a very good choice ATM, even better than their competitors
 

www-jweather-com

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Well, if it makes that big of a difference, the one I'm replacing is a Toshiba mk8025gas. In researching it, apparently it's one of the "newer" drives you were referring to. An 80gb 4200rpm with 8mb cache. So am I still going to see that big of a difference between the 4200 and the 7200? I imagine so seeing as how it's spinning almost twice as fast. Plus, I'm going to be getting a 100gb rather than a direct replacement of the 80gb.

Thanks again for all your help and info!

Jeff
 

croc

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7200 rpm drives are faster, but also are more battery intensive. 5400 drives are a good middle ground. In laptops there is always a trade-off between performance and battery life. Which is more important to you?
 

fredygarza

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Bare in my mind than a 7200RPM drive WOULD NOT spend that much energy off your battery just because it spins faster than a 5400RPM drive, the difference in power consumption is barely 0.2-0.3W. Also the Hitachi 7K200 have a massive 16MB Buffer Cache in comparison to the 8MB all newer drive have!
 

gent

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Last summer I replaced an OLD 20 gig (Fujitsu) 2.5" lap-top HD with a WD Scorpio 60Gig (the biggest available at the time), the new drive was not only 3x the size it used 25% less power and was (at least) 25% faster; I know WD aren't top-dog for (3.5") hard-drives, but I'd have no hesitation in recommending the Scorpio's.

When choosing a new 2.5" drive, be carefull with the size, some are thicker than others and won't fit all lap-tops.
 

WiRedPmP

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You'll notice no difference in reference to cache size, it's just not a problem, and 4200 to 7200 will give you about a 33% increase.
My boss had me do some research on a new hd for his tablet, hitachi is the way to go
 

tulie

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I have replaced and own several Seagate and Hitaachi 7200's and they vary in size like 100 and up in GB's
they will beat the 5400RPM's but you need to see what the through put is on their website spec's
I am abandoning even the nice 7200's for the ATA6/PATA SSD 64GB hard drive. THese solid state drives are very very fast on bootup and delivering data. The down side is they are slower writing but still fater than the HD's with the platters and moving parts. You will have to search for the best price on a ATA6/pata IDE notebook hard drive sometimes they are too high in price to consider but I have seen the 64GB around $190 if you want it fast this is the way I even have them in small brackets running in my desktop computers but they are the SATA drive which are more availible and in larger sizes like 128GB but I am running XP and Win-7 dual boot on a 120GB SSD and love it. It is just a hair faster than it's back up drives a WD 10,000RPM pair in RAID! Think about the price and the effort to learn how to config and cache the SSD... read up on it before you make a decision as it is not for beginners but is sweet if you can set it up right! :sol: