7200 RPM Drive or extra RAM?

[HofmaniaCSU]

Hey guys, my new T60 shipped today, and should be arriving within the next week! However, I didn't quite configure it with all of the options I wanted, and settled for 1 gig of RAM installed (1 stick x 1 gig), and a 120 gig 5400 RPM drive. Ideally, my T60 needs an extra gig of RAM, as well as a 7200 RPM drive, for optimal performance.
I am, unfortunately, in College at the moment, and can only afford one upgrade at this time (my parents dropped some serious change on the laptop, and I can't bring myself to ask them for more...). Basically my question is which upgrade would I see the greatest performance increase from: an extra gig of RAM (enabling the dual-channel, for a total of 2 gigs), or the speedier Hard Drive?
Keep in mind I will eventually have both the extra memory and the fast drive, but I need to prioritize for now. Also, on Newegg, I am unable to see any 7200 RPM drives with 120 gigs, and there seems to be only two brands : Hitachi Travelstar and Segate Momentus. Which one is generally preferred/superior? Do you guys know which brand of drives and/or memory Lenovo uses themselves? Thanks guys, and I'm lookin forward to reading your replies.

[brentpresley]

Above 1GB, always go for the 7200RPM drive. You get more feel out of that than 2GB RAM.

[justthinking]

Why don't you sell your 120GB 5400RPM HDD then go for Hitachi 7K100 100GB? It shouldn't cost you all that much to upgrade this way.
Then perhaps you can even afford to spend extra $80 to $100 on memory...

[FragrantHead]

I agree with Brent. In general you will feel no benefit going over 1GB, unless you have specific applications that need that much memory. I've read Windows Vista benefits from memory in excess of 1GB. I presume you're not getting that yet. Re. hard disks, you are right, I believe only Hitachi and Seagate make 7200RPM ones and the largest size is 100GB. I don't think there is much between them performance wise, although Tom's Hardware gave the Hitachi the edge, as far as I remember. Also the Hitachi is produced by the ex. IBM storage division, which Hitachi bought a while ago. I suspect IBM/Lenovo probably only use Hitachi drives.

[HofmaniaCSU]

Thanks for the input guys, I think I'm just going to go ahead and get the Hitachi Travelstar 100 gig drive. I don't want my 120 gig drive to go to waste either; would you recommend I buy some sort of external enclosure and just turn it into a USB external drive? How complicated would something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817392009
be to setup? Thanks again, and have a great weekend everyone.

[Ken Fox]

Thanks for the input guys, I think I'm just going to go ahead and get the Hitachi Travelstar 100 gig drive. I don't want my 120 gig drive to go to waste either; would you recommend I buy some sort of external enclosure and just turn it into a USB external drive? How complicated would something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817392009
be to setup? Thanks again, and have a great weekend everyone.

Maybe a better option is to buy an ultrabay Hard Disk Drive adapter that you can mount in your machine semi-permanently in lieu of the optical drive. I don't know about you, but I seldom burn CDs or DVDs in my laptops. When you would want to do that, you can simply pull out the HDD adapter and replace it with the optical drive. Access speeds through the system bus are going to be a lot faster with the Ultrabay adapter than with a USB or Firewire external box.

If you have more than one computer, a freestanding box would be more convenient if you have no other easy way (such as a wireless network) of transferring large files.

Freestanding 2.5" and 3.5" USB drives are cheap these days and in the end you might be better off simply selling your removed drive and buying one of those ready made external drive solutions, assuming for the moment that you have any real need for one. You could sell your drive on ebay as a "pull from a brand new system." Some people will pay more money for exactly the same drive with an IBM FRU number on it as they would for one from the same drive manufacturer without that label.

[HofmaniaCSU]

That's a great suggestion Ken; I completely forgot about the ultrabay and what you can do with it. I'm really not too concerned with buring DVD's/CD's on the go with my laptop, so leaving the optical drive out would definitely not be a problem. I already have 3 USB drives; adding another to my collection would be a complete waste. Would I just need to buy the "ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter" from Lenovo, replace the optical drive with it, and be set to go? Having 200+ gigs onboard at all times sounds good to me!

[Ken Fox]

That's a great suggestion Ken; I completely forgot about the ultrabay and what you can do with it. I'm really not too concerned with buring DVD's/CD's on the go with my laptop, so leaving the optical drive out would definitely not be a problem. I already have 3 USB drives; adding another to my collection would be a complete waste. Would I just need to buy the "ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter" from Lenovo, replace the optical drive with it, and be set to go? Having 200+ gigs onboard at all times sounds good to me!

Try this link to buy the adapter at a reduced price if you have a visa card:

https://www-131.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stor ... Id=1201232

It should work just fine without any other action on your part other than maybe formatting the disk.

[Lazarus]

The question is not that simple.
It totally depends on your planned usage for this system.
If you use it mostly for e.g. MS-Office applications , PowerPoints, Spreadsheets and the like then you should most definetely go for the extra RAM.
MS-Office apps are very RAM intensive (resource hogs) and your biggest concern would be to prevent Windoze from swapping (I assume you plan to use Windows).
Swapping always slows the box down, no matter how fast your drive is.
But if you plan to e.g. play complex games, run a web servers or store & index thousands of small files on your system, then you can't get enough RPM in any case.
Extra cache RAM is only good for read access.
Write access is normally not buffered (and in most cases shouldn't be, lest you know exactly how to repair a damaged FS), so if you will write often to a large # of files, extra RAM is not your first priority.
E.g. running a database system would fall under that category.

As for the DVD burner, you can use an external one via USB - IBM/Lenovo offers a super slim unit that is just as fast as the internal one.

[FragrantHead]

If you use it mostly for e.g. MS-Office applications , PowerPoints, Spreadsheets and the like then you should most definetely go for the extra RAM. MS-Office apps are very RAM intensive (resource hogs) and your biggest concern would be to prevent Windoze from swapping (I assume you plan to use Windows).

What are you doing with your MS-Office apps that the machine would actively use more than 1GB? I have that much memory in my machine and this never happens.

Swapping always slows the box down, no matter how fast your drive is.

True, but in my experience this never happens with 1GB and using only MS-Office.

[HofmaniaCSU]

Thanks for the link Ken, that's a great price for the ultrabay adapter. I'll be purchasing the Hitachi 100 gig Travelstar and the adapter this week.

And with regards to MS Office: I will be using it extensively, including spreadsheets and excel. My current desktop has 1 gig of RAM as well, and I rarely find my computer swapping files to/from the hard drive, so I'm quite confident 1 gig will serve me well for the time being. Either way, I'll be getting another stick of RAM within the next month or two, and it should be smooth sailing from there on out.

You guys have been prompt and helpful in your replies; this is really a great forum and I'm glad I posted here.

[justthinking]

If you already have 3 external USB drives, why are you obsessed with getting ultrabay adapter for the original 120gb 5400rpm hdd?

I would much rather spend the money else where either on memory or even a docking station...

[Ken Fox]

If you already have 3 external USB drives, why are you obsessed with getting ultrabay adapter for the original 120gb 5400rpm hdd?

I would much rather spend the money else where either on memory or even a docking station...

Sometimes those drives have stuff stored on them . . . . . also, having 2 drives in a T series laptop whose optical drive you use rarely, makes sense. I have one of those ultrabay adapters and have used it to hold very large RAW image files from digital cameras, for use with photoshop. It makes photoshop run very quickly to have the program and all your data on the system bus rather than through USB drives.

I'm sure there are other applications with large data files that similarly benefit from having them all on the bus through the IDE or SATA channel, rather than through a USB or firewire connection.