Thinkpads Forum

Hi folks,

If you have two HDDs one 7200rpm 100gb and 5400rpm 60gb and want to use one for the main hdd and the other for the storage in your bay which one would you use for the storage?

I'm wondering this since I tend to use the bigger one as a storage drive but in this case, the bigger one is faster so seems to fit better as a systerm Hdd. Any thoughts?

Thanks.

I'd use the bigger one as my main drive (faster RPM, higher density (I think)), and I would partion a portion of it to use for storage.

I think that it will depend on what you plan to store on the storage drive. If you are going to be saving and reading large files from it, then I would use the larger/faster drive as your storage.

The reason that I say this is because they would be the larger files and the transfer rate on large files is where you see the biggest difference in the 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives.

A faster drive for the system is a good bet. Exceptions might be if you, like me, will use the 2nd drive for multimedia editing (high churn applications), for instance Photoshop or Premiere and such.

Also, the brand can have a small impact. I bought a Hitachi 7k100, which in some independent reports took the lead in multi-tasking operations ... which a system drive is often doing (reading programs, paging out memory, writing data). The Seagate Momentus 7200.1(?) beat out the Hitachi on some Photoshop and video editing tests.

Now, they may've tested these drives as primary drives, not secondary data-only drives. YMMV.

I can tell you that even though my work TP is a 1.7 GHz chip, 2 GB RAM, and has a 7k100 drive, it *seems* zippier than my personal TP, with a 2.0 GHz chip, 2 GB ram, and a 5400 RPM drive. Purely subjective, mind you. And I'll guess that your 7200 RPM drive is newer, and maybe has enhanced shock and performance design elements ... might be a more reliable system drive. Again, this is subjective guesswork on my part.

I had a T42s (2373-K5H), upgraded it to 1 GB RAM.

1. It had a 40 GB 5400 RPM hard drive.

2. Upgraded it to 7K60 18 mths ago.
(quite a noticeably improvement--about 10% my guess. especially you're mutitasking big memory hogging applications--less swap drive usage. even right-click and the context menu pops up noticably faster).

3. 3 mths ago I upgraded to 7K100.
(Surprisingly it's also about 5-10% faster, due to higher data density. I bought it for the storage space, so additional speed is a nice surprise).

I'll use the bigger one as the systerm Hdd,because it has the faster RPM and higher density ,thinkpad will be more powerful!

w0qj wrote:... even right-click and the context menu pops up noticably faster) ...

I sincerely doubt the hard drive had any impact on context memory speed. But if your computing seems zippier, who's to complain?