5400 or 7200 hard drive

Comtemplating purchasing a Thinkpad. It comes with a 5400 and 7200 harddrive. The latter is, of course, faster. Can someone give me the pros and cons of doing this? Mostly I do word processing, browse the internet, and watch internet video clips.

 

I'm understanding that the 160 gig 5400 rpm drive is about as fast, if not the same speed as the 100 gig 7200 drive. Aparantly that perpindular recording stuff realy works...

But if thats all your doing, then you really don't need that extra speed. It's a small performance difference really, and only noticble when working with very large files or doing A/V work. I doubt you need one. Just don't get a 4200 rpm drive. Those are dogs.

 

I've used both the 100GB@7200 and [email protected] cannot tell the difference performance wise.

 

if you are only going to be using light apps like those the 5400rpm hard drive should be great plus you get 160Gbs more space. i would recommend getting a version of partition magic or some other partitioning program, it would increase the performance of either of those.

 

7200rpm is supposed to increase your boot time and application startup time by a significant amount. Whether this is true or not, I have yet to test. However, it seems logical since it can access the files that Windows needs quicker, therefore, loading the system resources quicker. I've also heard, however, that faster hard drives can decrease battery length and increase temperature. Once again, I cannot personally verify either fact.

I would assume that the pros for a quicker HDD would outnumber the cons. I purchased a 5400rpm HDD with my T60, and I have no problems with speed, yet I wish I opted for the 7200rpm because I love having the latest and greatest.

Matt

 

I think Matt means decrease boot time and application startup time by a significant amount.

While I was researching to buy my laptop, I found that the general consensus is as follows:

- The 7200rpm is faster than the 5400rpm, but only noticeable if you do heavy indexing, large file editing/moving (such as movies), and during startup times.

- The 7200rpm uses more battery than the 5400rpm.

- 5400rpm is MUCH cheaper per gigabyte.

I opted for the 5400rpm because I chose the 6-cell battery. Had I gone iwth the 9-cell, I may have chose the faster drive.

Edit: For internet browsing/video watching, the speed of the harddrive doesn't have much of an effect. Word processing documents are generally very small and boot up very quickly, so the speed of the harddrive probably will not be noticeable for that.

 

I'm currently a sony SZ owner and it has a 4200rpm drive. Let me tell you that 4200rpm is WAY too slow for any type of regular usage. I'm a business user and don't do games or really big file moves. I do however, run Outlook constantly with some really big mailbox files (multi gigabyte). I'm guesssing the indexing is what is causing the perf to completely suck.

I'm shopping for a T60 right now (ditching the Sony SZ) and am in the same dilemna about 5400 vs 7200rpm. At first I was just going to go with the 7200rpm but reconsidering the 5400 now based on this thread -- since battery life will be better and I'm questioning whether the perf will be /that/ much bettert with 7200pm (perpendicular recording?). Plus, with 5400rpm drive, max capacity is higher...

 

Well the 7200.1 that Lenovo uses from Seagate does not use Perpendicular recording, or at least that is what I think. The 7200.2s, however, I believe will. I do not know exactly what hard drives Lenovo uses for the 5400s, but if they use the Seagate 5400.3s, they have Perpendicular Recording I believe. The 160 GB 5400.3 I have in an external enclosure, but I've heard that it is very similar in performance to the 7200 RPM 7K100s, granted Hitachi/Seagate do not have a 160 GB 7200 RPM 2.5" hard drive, YET.

The 7200.1 Seagate Momentus in the T60 is very quiet. But remember that it does tend to draw a lot of power, as my laptop is pretty high end in terms of what you can get from Lenovo, and the battery ranges from 4-6 hours depending upon my settings and usage(averages about 5) with the 9-cell extended battery, and chaosrl said in another thread that he averages about 3 with light work.

 

The battery life difference between a 5400 and 7200RPM drives is marginal if any.

 

Oh ok. What i said was based upon what I've heard. I could be wrong

 

My R60 had the same battery life with it's original 5400RPM and the upgraded 7200RPM, about 3:15.