500GB 5400rpm vs 750GB 7200rpm

Hi all.

If I replace the 500GB 5400rpm HDD in my laptop (in sig) with a 750GB 7200rpm (this one) what kind of speed increase would I notice? I am a bit hesitant to do it as it would mean sacrificing the recovery partition and all drivers etc. Not to mention Windows itself and relying solely on recovery discs.

I am particularly interested in removing the texture pop-in issue for the game RAGE and having faster boot times/general performance.

Is it worth it? Or should I just not bother and wait until I can afford to buy a new laptop (not until at least next year probably)? I have filled up my current HDD now with all the Steam games I have and actually cannot fit them all on it anymore and use an external HDD anyway.

Is it too risky and will it be worth it in terms of performance boost?

 

You will see some improvement (depending on the model of your current HDD), but don't expect anything amazing like cutting your game load time by half or even 1/3, a good SSD can do that or even much better, but not a regular HDD like the one you linked.

Anyway, if you want a much more responsive system, get a SSD and use your current HDD as an external storage drive.

 

Where you would really notice a difference is with the Seagate Momentus XT 750gb 7200rpm drive -- the hybrid. Google it for lots of benchmark data and/or refer to the thread in this forum for more info.

I replaced my 5400rpm HDD in my notebook with the first generation Momentus XT with "only" 4GB NAND and noticed the boost. I would imagine with double the NAND and improvements in the caching, the newer 8GB NAND version would be even better.

 

well surely you will see benefit but I also was shocked to see such king of quesion in our time. Time of SSD and combo drives.

buy Seagate Momentus XT only. Looking at that horrible high prices on usual HDDs on Amazon.

 

There are ways around that problem...

Get an external USB hard disk enclosure. (They're not very expensive), and every computer store worthy of the name has them.
Install old hard drive into it.
Install new hard drive inside computer.
Boot your computer with a USB key or "LiveCD" containing Linux (any distribution containing GParted, such as Ubuntu, for ease of use), or whatever cloning program provided with your new disk, or Acronis True Image, or Symantec Ghost.
Clone all the partitions from your old drive to the new one.
Expand your main partition to use that new 240-something GB of space.
Make sure the flags on the drive and partition are set as bootable/active.

Done! Your recovery partition is still intact, you haven't lost any data, and your Windows looks just like it did before your started all this.

 

I have the Seagate Momentus XT 7200rpm 500gb with 4GB SSD hybrid drive and a Toshiba 750GB 5400rpm storage drive on my Qosmio X775 laptop.

Ive run Atto on both drives and for the life of me cant figure out why the 5400 drive is a tad quicker and more consistent at 100/100GB read/write performance.
The Hybrid drive does about 90/90GB read/Write in the Atto tests.

I expected at least 150/100GB read/write performance.
But seeing its just a benchmark and not an actual real world test the laptop boots extremely fast and programs open so fast you would think it had a pure SSD drive in it.

Im gonna put a 120/128GB SSD drive in in the coming weeks when i get paid and keep one drive for storage, But before i pick one im gonna run tests on both after i wipe them clean while in the storage compartment of the laptop.

Of course i gotta find the recovery partition so i can clone that to an external drive so i dont loose that since nothing comes with disks anymore.

But what im saying is, Dont judge a HDD by stated numbers alone. And if possible nothing will beat a good SSD drive if you have a second spot for a storage drive.

 

Thanks to what holiday did you expect 150/100 M B/sec read/write speed? It is HDD afterall. 2.5"HDD. No advance formatted HDD. And only 500GB which means may use old platters.

I'm saying that number is what you should use judging about performance. You just should have at least some knowledge in understanding. Momentus XT is fast because it uses SSD chip instead of HDD platters for programs.

 

I would highly recommend using windows backup or Paragon Backup & Recovery™ 2012 Free to create and image to your external drive - Recovery DVD's are not 100% reliable and this will give you an alternative way to restore.
I would wait, prices on SSD's are high now. If you get a new drive make sure it is SATA III especially if you want to upgrade to a new machine in 1 year.