? for W3J users with 7200rpm

Im getting a W3J sometime nextweek and I'm wondering if I should get a 7200upgrade. I'm probably gonna be using it for a few hours at a time and probably gaming on it as well. Hows the heat generated by the 7200? Is it bothersome at all especially since theres a heat vent at the right side where your hand usually is if you have a mouse. Also if anyone had a 5400 and upgraded to the 7200, how much of a difference is there?

 

Well from everything I've read and heard about, the upgrade to 7200 is not necessary and you would not even notice it. Not only that but it voids the warentee and causes more heat and lessens battery

I'd say stick with the 5400

 

yes i agree with smokeshot7

 

It depends on what you do, but performance increases can be 30+% if doing the right thing....... gaming is a tough call depending on what is actually be accessed... if it's mainly the optical drive, then no.... but a 7200rpm is good for a lot of things and is useful for a lot of people..... gaming, maybe not so much, but I mean you can determine what you're going to need before hand. If you're thinking of the upgrade, get it stock and see what you think and you can always keep the drive for external use or backups in a second hard drive kit down the road.

 

Unless someone can prove me wrong, 7200rpm drives don't really use a lot more power than 5400rpm drives. Here are the spec sheets:

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/5k160/5k160.htm
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/7k100/7k100.htm

So it uses at most 0.5 more Watts on average. The 8-cell in the W3J has 71Wh of energy, so if you manage to get 3 hours out of it with a 5400rpm drive, that means now you will lose a whole 4 minutes.

Regarding heat, since it uses 0.5 more Watts, it cannot dissipate more than an extra 0.5 Watts due to basic thermodynamics (unless the hard drive was designed in a completely different way to make it use power more inefficiently, but this is not likely). And you know what, you aren't going to notice an extra 0.5W.

However, you will notice the 7200rpm hard drive each time you move files around, load up a map, copy a DVD, etc.

 

..ho,ho,ho... green giant!

Sorry, you've got to expect that, right? Listen, real world experience means more than anything. If you want to tell this member that they will lose a difference of only 4 minutes over the course of 3 hours, be my guest. Your theory is good, the logic works.... but the practicle application isn't right. The only thing that could really help your case is if you work in that those who buy a 7200rpm drive typically use their system harder and have faster cpus and gpus as well and that's why most people with those drives report a decent difference between the two... but even that doesn't help either side.

In my experience the Hitachi's are the worst (although a **** solid drive and probably physically a little better than the seagates), but on my W3v that I used for close to a solid year........ a few months witha 5400 and the rest of the year with a 7200, my averages were close to 4 hours with the 5400 and more like 3:15 with the 7200. Now, I've got a 7200rpm seagate in my V6va and that actually isn't all that much worse than the 5400 hitachi that was in it, but we're still talking more than 4 minutes.... even if we're talking 16 minutes over that time, that's three times the life you're suggesting...... I'd say the seagates split the difference between the hitachi's, but that's still at the very best, 22 minutes over the life of the battery which is around 15% or so.

 

Thanks for the info, Justin! I didn't know the hard drive speed made such a difference in battery life before.

 

I do agree with some of that info, that Justin posted... however just for basic tasks... browsing the net etc. Not copying large files here and there, you really are only looking at like 5-10 mins less of battery life with the 7200RPM drive. But then if your just doing tasks like that, there is no point of the drive. It really all comes down to what you are doing with it. And how often you run on battery power and AC power etc.

 

Hrmm, so other than being able to access file faster, it isn't worth it to upgrade the HDD, unless the person is doing more intense applications. But, in a norm sense, well it makes somewhat a difference, but not a whole lot?

I've read some posts from the hardware section http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=63062
And this sticky, also from the hardware section
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=59053
Sorry to jump in.

Some do make good points, but positive/negative and counter points. On the heart issue, from what I've read, its miniscule as Green Giant stated.

So then are the ensembles already optimal at their factory state? No need for upgrades for normal usage situation?

Sorry, for budding in. I am kinda of a newbie at computers, just trying to learn on the way.

 

No, don't trivalize it like that......

there are a lot of things that benefit from the 33% faster spin rate.... For those of you who do typical office tasks, it's a waste of money, battery life, potential heat, and noise, that you're never going to make use of.

On the other side of the story, photoshop and premier productivity can be greatly increased, and by a seemingly bigger margin, the bigger the file. Also, 3d rendering programs like Maya and 3Ds Max loooove the faster speed drives and renderings, when coupled with a good graphics card and lots of memory, will show you exactly what the faster speeds will do for you. In a desktop, I prefer 10k raptor drives running in a raid set up for that sort stuff, but you don't have much of an option when you're talking about a notebook under six pounds.

The "average" user certainly doesn't need a 7200rpm drive and I really hope that doesn't offend anyone, but I'd rather you save your money than put it into something that basically only gets gives you bragging rights, if you're not going to be able to really put it to use.

Ensembles come ready for their average buyers needs....... They're high end, but not everyone needs all the performance you could get out of a hard drive, and yes still benefit from the cpu and memory and graphics card and screen..... Something like a stock W3j, coupled with a 100gb/7200rpm seagate hard drive and another 1gb stick of ram, you've got a portable 3d graphics workstation that you can really sit down with and pump out renderings with and you're only looking at putting in another less than $300 to do so. But it's not what everyone needs.

 

No offense taken. Thanks, I see what you mean. I myself will probably never do any 3D rendering. From what I can see, the most "intensive" application would be gaming. I guess it wouldn't really help then.

Thanks

 

I was wondering, since CS:Source is run off the hard drive would having a 7200 rpm HD instead of a 5400 rpm result in better performance and less hiccups or just simply faster loading times.

 

Wouldn't more Ram (in general) be better for performance? I would assume the faster HDD would be better for load up time.

 

In general, more memory will improve the performance. It will help to run the a few application smoothly. Not absolutly it can make it faster and faster. We also have to consider the whole machine such as cpu, hd, memory, front side bus frequency....., all of them work together, then it will make a change.
If you have 1GB memory, probably, upgrade a 7200rpm HD will be worth than memery only because 7200rpm will give you a difference when retreiving the file, running a OS, software and so on.

Cheers

 

In all my years with experience specifically centered on performance with issues like these.... a 7200rpm hard drive is going to be the biggest upgrade anyone could make if they feel their system could be better.....

More RAM can help if you're already using all you have up and multitasking a lot, but the difference between a lot of RAM and a lot more RAM isn't always even going instantly be the end all solution. If you have 1gb..... going to 2gb isn't going to help unless you're already maxing that 1gb out..

A faster CPU isn't going to jack if you're talking about the difference between say a 1.6 and a 2.1ghz core duo - when years down the road you won't even be able to max out that 1.6.....

A 7200rpm drive, at least for those who could marginally say they think they'd make use of it...... they'll see instant productivity increases.... I've said before the percentage can be upwards of 20%..... longer activites can where the read and write speeds are important will notice the biggest jump over hours, but even a handful of minutes over an hour add up..

 

Yeah. Dell used to put crap low-end hard disks in all their laptops. That was before they gave you the option to upgrade them based on anything other than hdd size. My friend got a very similar laptop to what I did last summer, but his was a dell. 3D and gaming performance-wise, ours were pretty close to even. But overall, his system felt slow, laggy, and really cheap. His computer took forever to load anything, to open applications, or to really do anything. The only difference between our computers is that I had a 7200 rpm hdd and he had a 4200. Those 4200 drives will really drive you crazy.

As Justin somewhat mentioned before, you can notice bigger power consumption differences between brands and models than rotational speeds. Certain 5400 drives may use more power than other 7200 drives. Some 7200 drives may use MUCH more than a 5400 drive. Usually, as someone said above, the difference between a manufacturer's corresponding hard disks that are identical except for rotationall speeds is about .5 watts. You could save this much power by lowering your notebook screen by one notch. You could save even more by letting your hdd spin down. Or you chould save more by buying a different brand hard disk.

I think it was Justin who said Hitachi's are "the worst". I'm perfectly happy with Hitachi. I've got a Hitachi hdd in ALL of my computers. They definately do not run hot, and power consumption really isn't an issue. Perhaps if you were to buy some sort of ultra-powersavings 4200 rpm disk, you might notice a difference. But that extra 30 minutes of battery life won't do you any good while you spend an extra 45 minutes waiting for files to open, save, or move. Or for programs to load, shutdown, etc. What will have a greater impact on your temperatures is your ambient temperature. Being in a warmer climate will have a much more noticable effect on hard disk temperatures than hard disk speed. And there are plenty more components that will eat up more power than a 7200 rpm hdd. Your screen, processor, graphics card(if dedicated) even wifi or BT, as well as USB devices all use as much or more power than you would save by switching to a lower speed hard disk.

Sure, if you have to void your warranty to install it, then maybe it is not a good idea. But as you can see by my sig, I always look for a fast hard disk for my system. In pretty much every system, the bottleneck is the hard disk. Of course, it depends on what you are doing for you to notice that the hard disk is a serious bottle neck, but just about everyone would benefit from a faster hard disk.

Just my thoughts on this topic.

 

Reviving a somewhat old topic. Is it possible to set up a RAID on a W3J or does it lack the controller?

 

Personally I'm going to upgrade to a Seagate 7200.2 160gb drive when it gets released next year.

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/marketing/po_momentus_7200_2.pdf

Now about performance, I have seen reviews of Asus laptops with 4200 drives absoloutely blitz cheap systems with faster CPUs and 7200 rpm HDDs with poorly designed motherboards, so its hard to compare differently designed laptops, just bacause it has a fast HDD won't make it nessecarily faster.

But.... any system where you perform intense disc applications on will benifit from a fast HDD, at work I currently run a 15K SCSI Cheater drive, it grunts away but boy... photoshop is fast and it loads applications super fast! I am running windows XP64ed with 4gb RAM and I can open a 600mb layered tiff file in under 10sec!

I have seen reviews stating power consumption between drives nut it seems to vary between models and to be honest the extra power consumption would be less than running with bluetooth on or turning your screen down.

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/mobile-hdds/index.x?pg=14

But under Load can be considerably more
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/10/12/fujitsus_mhv2200bt/page6.html

Although how often will you be sitting there fully cranking your HDD?? on battery at least the idle power consumptions are quite close.

If you are just gaming, I wouldnt bother, if you are running photoshop, 3D rendering, video / audio editing, rippping and music encoding or anything that uses the HDD, you will see a very noticable performance boost.

 

I went with the upgrade to the 160GB perpendicular 5400rpm drive. I am loving it! I did notice slight different in performance and REALLY noticed the space increase With the optional HD bay I now have 260GB of storage