Do 7200 RPM drives make a noticeable increase in performance?

I have done a bunch of research into this as well and just made my decision yesterday. I have a 100gb 7200 rpm Hitachi that came with my 1710, and I just ordered a Hitachi 160gb 5400 rpm drive. To help me make my decision I installed an old 80gb 5400 rpm drive and installed XP, all of the 3dmark programs, and a hard drive "real world" performance program that simply copied files you ask to and times them and gives you an average. I noticed NO difference at all. Of course the performance is likely less, but as I said I do not actually notice it.

Startup time was about 10 seconds longer when I timed it to the login screen, funny though it was actually shorter all the way to the desktop (I suppose because there were not as many programs running as on my 7200 rpm).

Copying a 1.7 gb file took 5 seconds longer (134 vs 129), again no way without timing that I would actually notice that.

All the 3dmark progams were either just above or just below my old numbers. That was not unexpected as they do not take into account the load times, and framerate obviously was unaffected (if you have less ram and have to use the swapfile it could hurt I suppose).

I have an external drive for backups, but I do not like to get it out all the time, I'd rather it be internal so I can just grab and go. If you can wait, I hear the large (200gb) 7200 rpm drives are coming out the first half of 2007. I chose the Hitachi because it had good reviews and the benchmarks looked great. I have read that the Seagate is hit or miss, and it may take months before it fails.

You will likely hear both opinions "it is noticable" and "you won't notice a thing". Here is mine: 7200 rpm performs better, but I would never have noticed unless I timed it. The space is much more important to me than a loading time going from 10-12 seconds or 50-60 seconds.

I would agree - the difference is measurable, but not necessarily noticeable. The big difference is from 4200 to 5400, and as long as it has 8Mb Cache, you'll probably be fine with the 5400.

Especially when the size difference is *60Gb*.

Be sure to check this thread out as well:

http://www.notebookforums.com/thread181920.html

I went from a 100GB 7200 RPM drive to a 160GB 5400 RPM one, simply because I needed the space. I would say that the 160GB is noticeably slower, but by a small amount. Note that file transfer rates, as quoted by others, are only part of the picture. Those happen to be almost equal between the two drives. However, file access times are 25% slower on the 5400 RPM drive, so, if you are reading many small files, the performance hit will be much more noticeable. Which one you choose, or which one is "worth the money" depends on your requirements. There is no cut-and-dry answer to that question.

I had a 60/5400 then a 60/7200 and finally a 100/5400, although the benchmarks from one to the next said there was a difference I never notice it...

i went from 100gb samsung 5400rpm 16mb cache to a 100gb segate 7200rpm 8mb cache. on hdtach the 7200rpm benchmarks 40MB/s compared to about 30MB/s on the the 5400rpm. there is some noticable difference, it's not huge but I'm working with HD video files encoded with QT animation and it gives me peace of mind knowing that's best I can get for disk speed.

If you do a lot of video editing, obviously the 7200rpm will be the better choice.

depends on what you're doing, how much space you need, and your willingness to use external storage... (esata for speed).....

I would recomend the 160GB 5400 RPM, and then get a large SATA II Drive and use firewire for video editing if you do that sort of thing

No, of course not. Like has been said before, it depends on your requirements. If you don't have requirements, then stay with what you have.

what kind of load times are you looking at? gaming load times, or file load times?

one thing i havent tried testing though, is load times for certain things, using both my 700m and m90 at the same time, and time them to see the differences in various things. i can't do it now, since I'm home for thanksgiving, and the other system is at school.

One more thing to consider is that the read/write speeds at the front of the 160gb drive will blow away the read/write speeds of at the end of the 100gb drive.

With all of the extra space you can set up your partitions in order to have the stuff you want faster at the front of the drive and the rest can be at the end. For example I plan to have my OS, swapfile and games in the first half of the drive and my other files (music, disk images, archive files etc) all at the end of the drive since performace means little with these files. This means I will give up less performance, if any at all. My games are all in the last 30gb of my current smaller drive, and they will be in the first 50gb of the bigger drive so I could actually see a small increase in performance. I doubt I will notice any change at all. Even if my load times increased 10% that would be hard to notice without timing.

Of course read/write speeds aren't the whole story as access time will always be slower on the lower rpm drive, but it helps ease the difference.

Sure, try googling the drives you have in question. Here are some nice reviews from Tom's Hardware. The first is a comparison of any two drives in the list (both my 100gb and the new 160gb are in the list). The second is just a review that compared many drives, it does not include my 160 gb drive but does include the very close Seagate drive I was considering.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storag...=414&chart=148

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/...pe/page19.html

Glad that helped.

Do you want to buy mine? In a week I won't need it anymore.