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?

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

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.

Great article!

Could anyone share their real life experiences with the difference though?

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.

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...

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.

external case? what dou mean by that?

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.

and only cost about US$25-30

VERY handy!!

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)

So if you had to choose between upgrading the RAM or the hard drive, which would you pick first?

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.

in my experience in 2 machines now.

HUGE IMPROVEMENT.