upgrading 5k320 to another hd or ssd .

i want to upgrade the 160 GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K320 in my Asus 1005ha to a much faster drive. What kind of noticable difference would i experience switching to a 500gb 5400rpm drive, or one of the relatively new 7200rpm drives (eg. 250gb 7200.4) ? i need the fastest drive for say £40 or less, i suppose there are no reliable fast ssds for around this price range?
thanks

 

im thinking about a 160gb 7200.4 which i can buy for about £36. how noticable will be the performance difference between this drive and my current 5k320?
thanks

 

Soon you should be able to get a pretty good SSD for around E50 to E60. Kingston's releasing a 40GB version of the X25-M G2 that should be available in the next couple months. It'll obviously be slower than a full-fledged X25-M, but that's still pretty damn fast. 40GB isn't much, but you may want to consider.

 

Thought it was based off of the X25-X (budget version, but for some reason they used X which one would think would be the eXtreme version).

 

why not simply get a Hitachi 7K320 or a WD Scorpio Black?

The 7200.4 is not as stellar a performer as its specs might suggest. In fact in many benchmarks I've seen it's beaten by some 5400rpm drives. The 7K320 or Scorpio have been around a while so are pretty cheap now.

 

I actually read that X25-X moniker somwhere... not sure how it came to be. I think the Kingston drive itself is supposed to be the X25-X and hence the budget version... or they were trying to say that the Kingston drive is derived from the X25-x, where x is a variable indicating M or E... as they both ultimately use the same controller?

 

toms hardware charts places the 7200.4 series consistently over the 7k320 and wd3200bekt. Also the 7k320 and wd3200bekt are too expensive for my budget. if you're gonna suggest a hd suggest one under £40 inc. p&p. I read some reviews about the kingston version of the x25-x and tbh i wasnt all together that impressed. http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/27/kingston-ssd-now-v-series-40gb-intel-x25-x/4
look at the file copy tests, the results are tbh abysmal.

 

160gb 5k320 to 160gb 7200.4 . how much of a difference wud i notice? anyone?

 

Nothing much.. try getting a bigger budget if you can.. it will allow you to get a bigger hard drive.. which is newer and has higher platter density and faster.. no point of upgrading if your gonna keep the same size..

 

Ya, I also 'trusted' tomshardware.com for the 7200.4 Seagates and ended up returning 4 of them that's how abysmal they were on clean Vista installs compared to my old 7K200 Hitachi.

I ended up buying a Scorpio Blue 500GB 5400 RPM model and even now, over six months later I can't find a faster mechanical hard drive with the same or bigger capacity.

Buy the Scorpio Blue and forget HD's for a couple of years, then buy an SSD.

 

techreport tested a bunch of 500GB drives and the 7200.4 had a really crummy performance considering the specs. And the winner of that test was the Scorpio Blue.