Thinkpads Forum

Does the 7,200 spin use more battery power? It does make things run faster, right?

This is not really a T61 related question...

slojes wrote:Does the 7,200 spin use more battery power? It does make things run faster, right?

The Hitachi 7200RPM notebook drives consume almost the identical power as their 5400RPM counterparts. The speed differential is noticeable.

Sorry kamaleon, I'm ordering the T61 tonight and this is my last decision on the model. I didn't mean to clog up the T61 forum, but was looking for a quick answer - my bad.

slojes wrote:I'm ordering the T61 tonight

Good for you let us know how it feels when you get it

Hi

Could you let us know what size of DVD there's in T61..I mean 12,7mm or 9,5mm
And have a lot of enjoy of your new ThinkPad

Regards

Considering in modern systems the hard drive is a large bottleneck, if not the only bottleneck, then going from 5400RPm to 7200 RPM is very noticeable in performance. I wouldn't touch a 5400RPM drive... even with FDE.

Considering the Turbo Memory...one could go for the 5400 IF you're not a die hard speed fan...and get similar results to the older 7200 drives...see: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.a ... =T61andR61

But again, faster means always faster.

I, for instance see a great difference in how a desktop that is behind my machine is catching up in graphics applications just due to my inferior (5400 rpm) hard drive.

masterus wrote:I mean 12,7mm or 9,5mm

Definitely 9.5mm Masterus. The T in my opinion will always go for the slimmer/lighter form factor.

Don't believe all the hype. I have BOTH the newer Hitachi 5400 RPM an 7200 RPM drives on my T60.

So, here's the REAL scoop on the Hitachi 7K100 7200 RPM drives:

1. MUCH QUIETER when idle than the old (noisy and hot) 7K60 7200 RPM drives.

2. COOL WHEN IDLE

3. STILL HOTTER than the 5400 RPM drives when running anything disk intensive, e.g. defrag, software update, paging, etc.

4. NOT MUCH FASTER than the 5400 RPM drive. About 15% faster at most.

So, if you are NOT sensitive to heat in the palmrest, then go for the 7200 RPM drive. If you are the least bit sensitive to heat or vibration, then go for the 5400 RPM drive.

We're not really sure how fast this Turbo Memory is, we've only had qualitative comments.

15% is quite a bit. It depends what operations you're doing. For instance game level loading times would be decreased with a 7200RPM hard drive.

csioucs wrote:Considering the Turbo Memory...one could go for the 5400 IF you're not a die hard speed fan...and get similar results to the older 7200 drives...see: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.a ... =T61andR61

The ReadyBoost caching speeds up random access (which is slow with any conventional disk) but does not make any difference for sequential access (ie reading or writing large files).