HDD 5400 RPM & 16 GB RAM vs 7200 RPM & 8 GB RAM

[Blondie21]

All else equal, what is better?

1 TB HDD with 5400 RPM and 16 GB RAM
or 1 TB HDD with 7200 RPM and 8 GB RAM

(If I buy a laptop with option 2, then I would be willing to pay for an extra 8 GB RAM if that would be possible for the laptop in question in my specific price tag range, but that's probably not possible in my case, therefore this question.)

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2547823/laptop-based-performance-1000-1300-week-vacation-york.html

EDIT: I'll be using the HDD as the secondary drive and a 256 GB SSD as the primair/boot drive

 

[uplink-svk]

7,2k rpm of course, but I'd go and hit the piggy bank and get the SSD. Trust me, for laptop [notebook] it's a must. No matter what You're gonna do on it, from playing games, to office work.

 

[Motoxyogi]

Personally I'd go with the faster hard drive over more memory.

8GB of RAM is about the norm for modern systems and unless you're using heavy editing software or something, I doubt you'd even max out 8GB.

You would definitely notice the difference between a 7200rpm and a 5400rpm HDD. Assuming everything else is the same the 7200rpm hard drive will allow your laptop to respond quicker to commands

 

[uplink-svk]

Though, there is a serious downside of 7.2k rpm HDD. It eats up more juice most of the time [significantly, about 10-40 minutes of notebook runtime] + it's noisy sometimes and also heats up significantly more.

SSD all over again ...

 

[Motoxyogi]

True. SSD's are pretty much the be all and end all of storage devices.

But they are still a pricey option and I'm not so sure about the powersaving features of them. I didn't notice much, if any difference when I swapped out my old laptops 7200rpm drive for a SSD. But it's a power hungry beast in the 1st place so your mileage may vary.

 

[uplink-svk]

Motoxyogi - from my personal experience, it goes from 10-40 minutes, after changing HDD for SSD. Depends on what HDD You have in Your notebook. If You have there some Scorpio Black, and it's 750 GB version runs up to 5 Watts at burn, and 1 Watt in idle, whilst SSDs goes up from 0,08 Watt at idle, to max 2 watts at burn. Newest Intel 530 goes like this:

Active: 195mW Typical
Idle: 125mW Typical
DevSleep: 5μW

And that's the big version. Small version goes:

Active: 140mW Typical
Idle: 55mW Typical
DevSleep: 200μW

So in general You save up to 5 Whr on Your notebook and that's a big deal.

 

[Blondie21]

Thank you all for the replies.

EDIT: I'll be using the HDD as the secondary drive and a 256 GB SSD as the primair/boot drive

 

[uplink-svk]

Blondie21 - a most and thoroughly excellent choice.

 

[Blondie21]

Though, there is a serious downside of 7.2k rpm HDD. It eats up more juice most of the time [significantly, about 10-40 minutes of notebook runtime] + it's noisy sometimes and also heats up significantly more.
SSD all over...

My current winner is: http://i.imgur.com/XsaS04W.png
Please give your opinion in: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2547823/laptop-based-performance-1000-1300-week-vacation-york.html

I'm still not sure if the upgraded ASUS recommended by Walter would eb a better choice and if there exists a better laptop for my budget.

 

[uplink-svk]

That's a hard one. In general there are five factors You didn't mention in particualr in Your thread. Please order these five attributes in an order beginning from the most important to You, to least important, in that exclusive order.

1. design
2. portability
3. gaming performance
4. serious work performance
5. display quality