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Noticeable difference upgrading from 4200rpm to 7200rpm hard drive?

post #1 of 14
3/23/04 at 9:52pm
Thread Starter 
I'm thinking about upgrading from a 4200rpm to a 7200rpm hard drive for my notebook, and i was just wondering what would be noticeable on upgrading.

Compile times, windows bootup times...?

Would game performance differ at all? Lineage2 is a little laggy on me, I wonder if upgrading HD would help with that?
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post #2 of 14
3/23/04 at 10:34pm
http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/20031031/index.html


Good article on that.

Buddy of mine works for maxtor, his opinion was that hard disk speed can be more of a bottleneck than proc speed.

Take it as you will.

E
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post #3 of 14
3/23/04 at 11:06pm
Hell yeah. The article that EricT posted says it all.
The only thing I use 4200 RPM disks for these days is backup.

A faster disk will only help a game if the game has to load new maps etc. Otherwise disk is not a cause of lagging.
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post #4 of 14
3/24/04 at 4:59am
Thread Starter 
Great article!

Could anyone share their real life experiences with the difference though?
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post #5 of 14
3/24/04 at 5:31pm
Sure.

I had a Dell i8600 w/ a 4200 RPM which I returned later. Then I got a ABS zForce F2w/ a 7200 RPM drive.

I would say that for the most part, the 4200 loaded programs (games) slower, and loaded Windows slower. The difference was around 1-2 seconds, but it was noticable and with some games (like NFS:U) it may get annoying.

Also, transfers btwn. my notebook and my ext. HDD suffered slightly longer times w/ a 4200 RPM drive; I think the transfer time for my ~2.5GB of music was extended from ~8 minutes w/ the 7200 RPM to 9-10 minutes w/ the 4200 RPM, but I don't remember enough to give exact numbers.
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post #6 of 14
3/24/04 at 5:39pm
Yes - BIG difference going from 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm

Load times are MUCH less and I dont get any stop ups when I try to run several programs at the same time...
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post #7 of 14
3/25/04 at 2:27am
I noticed a very nice difference going from a 4200rpm drive to a 7200 one.
Laptop boots alot faster. App's load & save faster, etc.
Like so many others, I bought an external case for my old 4200 and use it for backups.
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post #8 of 14
3/25/04 at 3:39am
external case? what dou mean by that?
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post #9 of 14
3/25/04 at 7:20am
An external harddrive enclosure -- in this case, one designed to hold the dimunitive laptop harddrives.
Very commonly available with your choice of connectability (e.g. USB2.0, Firewire, both...) at many computer hardware vendors.
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post #10 of 14
3/25/04 at 8:38am
and only cost about US$25-30

VERY handy!!
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post #11 of 14
3/25/04 at 11:21am
You'll notice the difference most if you regularly use your page file (swap). The less ram you have, the more your page file will be used. You can watch a graph of your swap usage in task manager. That said, no hard drive is fast enough to not have a noticable falloff from ram.
Also whatever speed your hard drive, there will be a very noticable difference if you keep it defragmented.
(fixed typos)
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post #12 of 14
3/26/04 at 2:19am
So if you had to choose between upgrading the RAM or the hard drive, which would you pick first?
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post #13 of 14
3/26/04 at 2:30am
If you are running XP with 512MB or less I would go for memory. If you have a gig-o-ram then definitely disk.

Memory wise a lot depends upon what you use the laptop for and how many simultaneous things you have open. For me I have anywhere up to 20 open web pages, streaming (or is that screaming - I never can tell) real-time data feeds, stock market analysis programs and then throw in MS Outlook, Word, Acrobat and a few other shells, I go thru about 700MB on a typical day.

So tell us what sort of apps you have running at once and how much memory you have now and we can give you a better answer.
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post #14 of 14
3/26/04 at 4:11am
in my experience in 2 machines now.

HUGE IMPROVEMENT.
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