7200 vs 5400 drive

[biinkbok]

I purchased a T60 with an 80GB 5400 drive and now I wondering if I should have spent he extra money to get a 7200 drive.

I do mostly office work, but outlook can be terribly drive intensive. I also do some photoshop and video rendering, but these are mostly done on external USB drives.

Would I notice the difference. Someone told me it's like night and day.

[RonS]

In real-world use, I've found the that the difference between a 5400 drive and a 7200 drive is large, definitely worth the upgrade if performance is an issue. The whole system feels snappier, much more so than the benchmarks indicate.

You can buy an ultrabay hard drive tray and use your 5400 drive for backups.

[astro]

I do mostly office work, but outlook can be terribly drive intensive. I also do some photoshop and video rendering, but these are mostly done on external USB drives.

Would I notice the difference. Someone told me it's like night and day.

Outlook? I doubt it. Better off buying another 1GB RAM and never closing Outlook.

[markgreene]

I have a friend with an ultra-portable acer that is something like a 4200 RPM, and even IT is snappy on windows boot up times and program load times.

I would only upgrade to a 7200 if moving from something as slow as a 4200.

I am with astro on this, add more RAM to increase office and other apps performance.

Though if you decide to upgrade, make sure to come back and let us know what you think about it.

[biinkbok]

I decided to upgrade to a SATA 7200 80GB Hitachi.

There is no question that the machine is snappier, and more responsive.

Outlook loads in about 1/2 the time.

Everything is just quicker.

I also plan to upgrade memory, but I have to say this was worth it.

I took the second drive and put it in the Ultrabay and reformatted the windows partition to use it for extra storage. Very cool.

What I would really like to do is delete the Recovery partition from the main drive and use the second drive for recovery if I need to. I assume all I would need to do would be to change the boot sequence.

Has anyone tried this?

[heelix]

I've got a t60p, with a 100G 7.2k and a 100G 5.4k drive (I'll swap out the disk depending on what I am working on). The faster is running Windows 2003 server, the slower a fresh copy of WinXP. Any real world benchmarks I can run for you folks?

[31336]

HD Tach perhaps?

[FlexOink]

I would certainly recommend the 7200rpm.

I use photoshop and premiere. And with both programs you really need fast drives access and write speeds. I must say that for normal windows use doesnt really benefit from a fast HDD, cuz if you have enough RAM windows doesnt need to acces the drive all the time.

[wallybear]

My 2623-D6U shipped with the 5400rpm 80GB drive. It is almost entirely silent (so quiet that when I first started the machine I was impressed with the lack of drive noise). Also, the system fan seems to rarely operate and is relatively quiet when it does.

I bought an Advanced Dock to use with my T60 (Lenovo had a great price for a short time: $253). I decided I wanted to have a hard drive in the "Enhanced" Media Bay of the Dock. So, I bought a SATA drive adapater (cost $43 from Lenovo). This adpater will also work in the T60's "Slim" Media Bay.

I then bought a 7200rpm 80GB Hitachi 7K series drive to "match" the original in size. I debated the cost of the various options ($125 for the 80GB 7200, $75 for an 80GB 5400, $170 for a 100GB 7200, $100 for a 100GB 5400, $130 for a 120GB 5400). I only considered Hitachi drives (not Seagate or Fujitsu, etc.) because of their reputation (I had read all the reviews I could find) and because of the near-silent operation of the 5400rpm drive that shipped in my T60.

I finally decided that I would most value some extra speed, rather than space, because I know the main "bottleneck" in terms of performance in any notebook computer is the hard drive. In fact, it seems rather silly for pay for a fast CPU and plenty of RAM but then be hobbled by a "slow" HDD. My plan was to put the 7200 HDD in the T60's internal bay and then move the old 5400 HDD to the SATA drive adapter for use in the Media Bay of the T60 or the Advanced Dock.

After lots of soul-searching, I decided the best bang-for-the-buck from my point of view was the 80GB 7200 drive. Also, because I wanted to "clone" the original 5400 drive (I had spent many hours configuring it), I decided that having a disk of the same exact size (cylinders, sectors, etc.) would be best way to go.

I used the "BackItUp" program in the Nero 7 Enhanced Suite to do the cloning. I made a full disk backup (sector by sector) to an external 300GB Maxtor One Touch III drive (which is my primary backup drive). I then restored the backup to the new 7200rpm drive. Then, I edited the "Boot.ini" file to tell Windows that there were two bootable disks in the machine (and which was which). This step avoided the problem that others have mentioned on this forum of Windows thinking it has 2 "C:" drives after a cloning is done.

Now, with all that background explained, here are the details I think all you folk most want to know:

-> The 7200rpm drive is definitely (a bit) louder than the 5400rpm drive. The faster drive makes more of a "whooshing" sound than the slower drive (sort of like the sound of the DVD drive spinning). I immediately noticed that the sound level was increased (as I said, a bit) over the original drive, but I want to STRESS that the sound is still very low and totally acceptable to me. The faster drive makes no clicking sounds nor does it vibrate more, it just makes a louder "whooshing" sound (obviously because it is spinning 33% faster....there is that little thing we call Physics to deal with here).

-> Drive performance tests (using HDTech) showed that my subjective experience that the machine suddenly "got faster" were true. The average MB-per-second transfer rate of the 5400rpm dirve was 34MB. The 7200rpm drive increased that by a third to 45MB. I got the same results whether the drives were in the Media Bay or the internal bay. The machine boots in about 1/3 less time and it launches applications and displays Start Menu items in much less time, too.

So, I am as happy as a T60 user can be with this upgrade. Although my machine is "only" a 1.83GHz Core Duo with 1GB of RAM, the faster HDD made a significant (to me) difference at the cost of $50 more (over the same-sized 5400rpm drive) and a bit more operating noise (the "whooshing" sound I described).

Not a bad result, I think, for a Saturday afternoon's work.

[freddy418]

I have 2 of the 5400rpm Hitachi SATA drives, one 80gb and a 100gb and the weird thing is the average MB-per-second transfer rate of the 80gb drive was 33 MB/s and the 100gb is up around 40 MB/s.

I just recently got a 60gb 7200rpm to try out on the T60p and I'm not really impressed, the cost is the same as the 100gb 5400rpm, yet the performance is just marginally better and it is also louder and more power hungry.

So at the end of the day, density * speed is probably a more important metric than spindle speed alone.

[tselling]

I upgraded from a SATA 7k100 100gb drive to a 5k160 160gb drive and I don't see a difference in speed myself and the extra HD space is nice. Under $170 shipped from buy.com fairly regularly.

http://www.buy.com/prod/Hitachi_Travels ... 81064.html

[claudeo]

Spend money on more RAM before you spend money on a faster drive. You will see a big difference with more RAM. A faster drive (without more RAM) *might* get you a 5-20% faster boot. BFD. Notice that while Windows is starting the drive sometimes doesn't get hit for seconds at a time--drive speed won't make any difference there. Performance while working is what matters.