7200 vs 5400 rpm

so.... faster hard drive makes the computer boot faster and BT faster? any other benefits?

what about wifi 4965AGN and regular 3945ABG?

 

I'm not aware of any 7400 rpm or 5200 rpm drives from any of the current Laptop producers so the benefit of going with an imaginary HDD DNE.

I do know that 15k rpm > 10k rpm > 7.2K rpm > 5.4 rpm in speed, noise, and vibration.

 

Actually it is 7200 and 5400, you switched some numbers around :O

BT won't see any benefit, and neither will WiFi, but you will see some benefit in boot times with the 7200RPM. A lot more factors than the rotational speed of the motor determine the actual speed of the drive (stuff like cache and memory density). For most things, a Seagate 5400.3 will be nearly as fast as a 7200.1. The newer 7200.2 are faster than both of these however, but they are on back order, and are extremely expensive because of demand. If you need more space = 5400RPM, if not go 7200.

 

4965AGN adds 802.11n support, 3945ABG doesn't.

 

The 7200 rpm drive will consume more power and release more heat.

 

Just out of idle curiosity, do you by any chance own a laptop with a 5400 HDD?

Thought so.

 

Nothing worth mentioning though.

 

Yeah my 7200.1 runs very cool and quiet.

 

um.. can somone give me an estimate on boot time 7200 v.s 5400?

 

Sure do, and I ordered a T61 with a 7200 rpm HD. No need to be snarky.

 

Boot time for 7200 is about 5 seconds from the time you press the power button to desktop. 5400RPM is about 2 minutes and 10 seconds. Yeah, I'll put down the pipe. Seriously though, you won't see much of a difference. Maybe the boot time will be 5-10 seconds less with the 7200. If they get proper BIOS and drivers going for Turbo Memory it could substantially reduce boot times. Maybe knock 30 seconds or more off.

 

Hah. On my current desktop, it takes 5 seconds from the time I press the power button to the time anything even appears on the screen.

Did you just call me a snark?

 

so... ppl pay the extra money for 7200 because boot faster?

 

TM isn't going to affect boot times. TM is flash memory. When the machine is turned off, there's nothing there. The benefit in TM is in resuming from sleep because the data in the cache can be retained using very low power and reading it in from the cache is much faster than loading off of the HDD.

 

WRONG!!!!!

Flash Memory is non-volatile. Meaning when you power it off it'll retain the information. It's not RAM where it'll lose everything. Turbo mem/ Ready boosts is going to work at storing boot files and prefetch files.

 

Yeah, you're right. Dumb mistake on my part.

You demonstrated a classic trait of a tech person. Most techies absolutely relish in telling someone they are wrong. Your time will come.

 

Yes, people pay extra so it will do almost everything just a little faster. Just like people will pay extra for a 2.2ghz processor over a 2.0 ghz processor. It's probably not going to be the difference between whether or not it will run an application, but it will run a little faster and a little smoother. In general, when it comes to computers, if something might make it run the slightest bit faster or smoother, there are plenty of people that will buy it.

Something to keep in mind with hard drives... If you have a fast processor, lots of fast RAM, fast video card, all the bells and whistles etc., the slowest component in your computer is probably the hard drive. Some people like the idea of reducing that "bottleneck" when at all possible. Other people don't think it is worth the extra draw on the battery.

 

Everybody keeps saying the 7200 rpm eats a lot more battery. However, how much more is it?! Haven't found anybody yet with a concluded answer.

 

I'm going for 5400RPM for less noise, lower power consumption, less vibration, and higher capacities. I'd be interested in some benchmarks on 7200 vs. 5400. I think many people would, not only on just this forum but all of the notebookreview forums.

 

Here's a chart from Tom's Hardware that lets you compare idle and at load power consumption between hard drives. I haven't done the work to calculate how it'll translate into battery usage.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html

 

I guess I never considered load times....I only got the 7200rpm drive as I copy a large amount of files very often and I am sick of the slow copy times on my 5400rpm units.