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4200RPM Hard drive? How bad is it? - Page 2

post #21 of 26
9/18/03 at 12:45am
I have the Dell D800, which is basically the same as the Dell 8600. I bought mine with the 4200 RPM Hard Drive and almost immediately upgraded to the 7200 PRM, which I bought off of New Egg.

Here were the battery life differences.

4200 RPM: 4 hours, about 10 minutes
7200 RPM: 4 hours, about 5 minutes

Essentially, there is absolutely no difference, which is exactly what I have read on the internet. In fact, one website I read an article from actually stated that the 8mb cache in the 7200 RPM drive would help to improve battery life, so who knows....
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post #22 of 26
9/18/03 at 11:08am
ok no difference in battery life but what was the difference in performance regardless of the benchmark specs.
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post #23 of 26
9/18/03 at 3:21pm
Well to say the least, the performance difference was amazing. I can't tell you using a benchmarking program, but it sure felt a whole hell of a lot quicker. For example, opening programs was definitely improved.

Also, it took about 12 minutes less to install Windows XP Professional, maybe even a little bit more.
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post #24 of 26
9/18/03 at 3:55pm
Quote:
Originally posted by bigshloss
Well to say the least, the performance difference was amazing. I can't tell you using a benchmarking program, but it sure felt a whole hell of a lot quicker. For example, opening programs was definitely improved.

Also, it took about 12 minutes less to install Windows XP Professional, maybe even a little bit more.
My guess is the 8MB vs 459kb cache help that out substantially.

Not really an ACCURATE test, unless they say all 4200rpm drives have crummy caches (which could be possible).

-myrkat
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post #25 of 26
9/18/03 at 8:29pm
No, the 4200 RPM drive I had used was with a 2mb cache. That drive up there that we are looking at isn't even 4200...it's listed as a 4900. That's just a real old laptop hard drive with a cache that doesn't compare to the 4200 RPM drives of today, let alone the 60 GB 7200 RPM 8 MB cache drive that is now available.

The hard drive is still a bottleneck in a laptop system no matter how you look at it. Whether speaking in terms of speed OR size, that is about the only area a laptop can't even start to compete. The 7200 RPM drive gives hope.

Now when is my 200 GB 8MB cache Serial ATA laptop hard drive coming out?
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post #26 of 26
9/21/03 at 4:33am
i've had 15k rpm drives, and my 8887 uses a 4200rpm 60gb. i can honestly say that one task on either has not been faster than the other. i do mostly photoshop/dreamweaver/illustrator stuff; which isnt really disk intensive to begin with. so this is probably sh1t advise for you. but i consider myself a power user(for wtf that's worth) and have been quite satisfied with the 4200 turntable of my 60gb.
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