is 7200 vs. 5400rpm noticeable?

[pipspeak]

I'm deciding between a 80GB/5400 or 60GB/7200 hard drive for a T43 and was wondering is there is really a noticeable difference in speed between the two (in the real world, that is, not through benchmarking) ?

I don't need the extra 20GB now but it's always good to have some free capacity, and I'd rather that than a two-second faster boot or 0.5 second faster application start up time.

[keku]

when you run some tools to check performance difference it does show some difference.

But I've run this thinkpad with 80GB 5400 Rpm and 60 GB 7200 RPM and have not experienced much difference.

I use my thinkpad for development purposes and sometime HDD uses is really intensive.

but it's obviuos 7200 RPM is faster than 5400.


It's your personal choice what you want to choose, 20 GB more space vs a little improvement in performance (when performing lots of read and write operation to HDD).

[pipspeak]

it's obvious 7200 RPM is faster than 5400

I think I'll go with the 80GB/5400 over the 7K60, figuring I'd really see little difference. Most of my work seems to be more CPU and RAM intensive.

When you say it's "obvious" that 7200 is faster, do you mean obvious in the sense of specifications, or obvious in the performance you've experienced (or both)?

[leo221]

i have 5400rpm in my older t41 and 7k60 in my new t43. i installed VS.NET 2003 in my t43 yesterday. it took a lot less time than installation on t41.

ps. if you have installed vs.net, you know it takes a lot of time.

[verktyg]

Yes and no on noticeable differences. I replaced the original 5400 RPM 40G HDD that came in my X31 with an Hitachi 7k60 7200 RPM 60G HDD.

The 7k60 booted in half the time (30 sec. vs. 60+ secs.) of the original HDD. The 7k60 has an 8MB cache/buffer, the original 5400RPM, 2MB.

I also have a Toshiba 5400 RPM 40G HDD with 16MB of cache/buffer. It's just about as fast as the 7k60 but makes a lot more noise.

Cache size makes a lot of difference.