Laptop hard drive speed and space

[mchong75]

Is there a noticeable difference between a 5400RPM versus a 7200RPM hard drive?

I’m customizing my laptop order via Dell.com and I can’t decide if I want the faster hard drive or to go with a larger memory. If I could, I would like both but Dell doesn’t offer that.

My choices are:


250GB SATA 5400RPM
160GB SATA 7200RPM

[jeffscra]

I would take the space over the speed.....I really doubt you will notice the difference between the two during operation.

[mchong75]

That's what I was wondering.

I know on paper (specs), the 7200RPM is faster but, for average joe, I wonder if it's really noticeable.

[AirBrontosaurus]

Speed really, really is noticeable. Startlingly so. A 5400 RPM HDD will feel like January Molasses compared to a 7200 RPM one. Windows will boot up much faster, your computer will respond more quickly, and programs will start up faster too.

Go for speed over space is speed is AT ALL important to you. If you really don't care, then I suppose space would be better.

Still, going from 160gb to 250gb isn't really all that much.

[misfit]

definately an issue, go with the faster speed drive as AB says.

[toneyw]

IMO, I'd go with the larger drive. Unless you do alot of data transfer, the few ms you gain is nothing.

[mchong75]

Hmmm, now that you mentioned it, it is sluggish when I try to lanuch applications, upload and download files from portable hard drives, windows does boot up bit slow.

Decisions, decisions, decisions...........

[cdifoto]

The smaller faster drive is a smarter option. Get an external to dump your non-working files to. If there was a 160GB 7200 SATA drive option when I got my Dell I would have jumped on it, but I had to go with an 80GB SATA for the same speed.

[jtalerico]

What what are you going to use the laptop for?

Seeing that this is a photography forum you are not going to need a very fast drive to open / edit / save files. Now if this was a server or if you were going to be using this laptop for gaming, then yes, I would suggest the 7200RPM...

[Tony-S]

A 5400 RPM HDD will feel like January Molasses compared to a 7200 RPM one. Still, going from 160gb to 250gb isn't really all that much.

At around 120 or 130 gigs of data, the 250g/5400rpm drive will catch and surpass the the 160g/7200rpm drive in speed.

[mchong75]

What what are you going to use the laptop for?

Seeing that this is a photography forum you are not going to need a very fast drive to open / edit / save files. Now if this was a server or if you were going to be using this laptop for gaming, then yes, I would suggest the 7200RPM...


It's mainly for photo editing & storage. And, of course, musics and video files. (which these take up most of the spaces)

[jtalerico]

mc -

I highly doubt you are going to really notice much of a difference from 5200 - 7200 with what you are going to be using the drive for.

[AirBrontosaurus]

mc -

I highly doubt you are going to really notice much of a difference from 5200 - 7200 with what you are going to be using the drive for.

You mean, like... anything?

If you care about performance at all, the difference really is night and day. I've owned and worked with both; 5400 RPM is slow. Now, if you don't care about speed, then 5400 RPM is just fine... but then why ask the question in the first place?

I believe that, since the OP asked if he should get a faster drive or a larger drive, that he was interested in the performance a faster drive would offer, and was wondering if it was worth losing the additional size for. If you care about performance even a little bit, it is well, well worth the trade off of space. Thus, I believe that the speed difference on a 7200 RPM drive is worth trading for the space on the 5400 RPM drive.

And, an external 400gb HDD and enclosure is all of about $90. So, buy the faster drive, then put your OS, photoshop, and other larger/disk hungry applications on it. Then, dump the rest on the 400gb.

Disk speed can and does make a huge difference in the performance of a computer. HDDs are by far the slowest components, so any increase in performance on them is going to be felt by every other aspect of your computing.

At around 120 or 130 gigs of data, the 250g/5400rpm drive will catch and surpass the the 160g/7200rpm drive in speed.

True, but now you're getting into large-data burst rates, fragmentation, and other factors (ie, it's no longer apples to apples). The fact is that the access time of a 7200 RPM drive is less than that of the 5400 RPM drive, which leads to faster access of your data. The factors that can affect that access time (such as using a huge portion of the drive) are important, but that example is not exactly fair. In practice, the 7200 RPM drive is faster if you use a percentage instead of an absolute (and somewhat arbitrary) value (ie. 230 of the 250gb available on the larger drive compared to 150 of the 160gb on the small drive).

If you ever find yourself using 85-90% of a hard drive's capacity, then ANY drive is going to slow down. Instead, get a cheap dump drive and most of your problems will go away.

[cdifoto]

If there was no performance difference between 5400RPM and 7200RPM, they wouldn't make 7200RPM drives.

[jtalerico]

Anyway, OP you cannot go wrong with either drive for what you are going to be using it for.

^^ How about battery life? From what I have read you will see about 15% increase in computer performance. But with that, your battery will suffer.. Not sure how much though.

[Tony-S]

I believe that, since the OP asked if he should get a faster drive or a larger drive,...

I understand OP was asking about a faster drive or more memory (i.e., apply the savings from a 5400 drive to buying RAM). Hopefully the OP has not abandoned the post and will chime in.

True, but...(snip)

I'm not disputing anything that you said, just pointing out that the 5400 drive will access faster near the 7200 drive's capacity. Something for the OP to consider. I just upgraded from a Macbook to a Macbook Pro. Both drives were 160 gig 5400. The MBP boots, reads data and launches apps faster than the MB did, so there's more to hard drive speed than RPMs.

[AirBrontosaurus]

I understand OP was asking about a faster drive or more memory (i.e., apply the savings from a 5400 drive to buying RAM). Hopefully the OP has not abandoned the post and will chime in.

Ah... see the way I read it, he was saying he could either get the faster hard drive or the one with "larger memory," ie more storage space. I didn't think he meant save the money and invest it in more RAM (I believe the Dell 160gb 7200 is the same price as the 250gb 5400).

Would be interesting to see what the case really was.