160GB 5400rpm vs 100GB 7200rpm laptop drive

[geekphreak]

I would like to hear some input on this:
I have a zv6000 laptop with an 80GB 4200 rpm drive, which is partitioned to dual boot Ubuntu and XP. I have about 25GB free combined, that is to say, I do not use too much disk space.
The current hard drive is annoyingly slow, and I am considering replacing it. I can get a 160GB 5400rpm drive for the price of a 100GB 7200rpm drive. Most reviews I read said that 7200 rpm drives do wonders when it comes to boot time and program load time.

My question for you is: do you think that the speed of a 100GB 7200rpm drive is worth the space of a 160GB 5400rpm drive?
Would the speed improvement of going from 5400 to 7200 rpm be more noticeable than the improvement of going from 4200 to 5400 rpm?
Which one would you recommend I choose?

Again, I would just like some input from people to see what you guys think, so I can weigh in all the pros and cons before making my decision.

[inimesekene]

I recommend the bigger and slower rotating drive: it is bigger and it's better for your battery life.:)

[ep2011]

I would recommend a 7200rpm drive, if you are going for a faster drive, go for the 7200. Since you do not use too much disk space, the 60 gigs is not worth it. Your better off getting an external drive and using the faster drive for /.

[Compucore]

What are teh Cache sizes on both of them? I have a 3.5 inch 160 for one of my regular pc and the Cache is about 8 megs. Loads the OS very nicely. ANd from which manufacture are the hard drives from???

COmpucore



I would like to hear some input on this:
I have a zv6000 laptop with an 80GB 4200 rpm drive, which is partitioned to dual boot Ubuntu and XP. I have about 25GB free combined, that is to say, I do not use too much disk space.
The current hard drive is annoyingly slow, and I am considering replacing it. I can get a 160GB 5400rpm drive for the price of a 100GB 7200rpm drive. Most reviews I read said that 7200 rpm drives do wonders when it comes to boot time and program load time.

My question for you is: do you think that the speed of a 100GB 7200rpm drive is worth the space of a 160GB 5400rpm drive?
Would the speed improvement of going from 5400 to 7200 rpm be more noticeable than the improvement of going from 4200 to 5400 rpm?
Which one would you recommend I choose?

Again, I would just like some input from people to see what you guys think, so I can weigh in all the pros and cons before making my decision.

[maniacmusician]

7200 RPM, definitely. 5200 is a nightmare in terms of speed. It'll give you better battery life, but I'm more concerned with performance to be honest.

as Compucore says, cache size is also important. 16MB of cache is the optimal setting nowadays and it's what I look for when buying internal hard drives for my desktop. Not sure about laptops though.

[B. Gates]

7200PM for sure. You said it yourself - space isn't an issue.

[geekphreak]

Thanks for all the comments.
Now to answer some questions:

Well, both drives have 8MB cache, which is standard for laptops (not many laptop drives have I seen wiyh 16MB cache). 160GB is by Seagate and 100GB one is by Hitachi.

Cache brings up another question: How do you think a 5400 rpm with 16 MB of cache would stand against a 7200 rpm with 8 MB cache in terms of noticeability? It is obvious that one is faster, but how noticeable do you think the difference would be? Keep in mind it is laptop drives we're talking about.

[tgalati4]

If you do a google search, someone did a comparison and produced nice charts comparing drive speeds vs CPU benchmarks.

Obviously 7200 will give you faster response. If you have 2GB of RAM then it doesn't matter. I have 1.25 GB of RAM and I have a 4200 RPM disk. But after 27 days of uptime, the memory is pretty full of the applications that I use, so drive speed is less of an issue.

What is an issue is heat and longevity. The 7200 drive will run hotter and at the higher speeds there is a slightly greater chance of sector seek error. The bearing will also get more wear. A typical 5400 rpm drive will last 3 years, a typical 7200 rpm drive will last 2 years with heavy use.

More important is the individual drive quality. Search the web for those particular models and you will see the horror stories that others have had.

Choose the drive with fewer horror stories. Afterall when a disk crashes, it really ruins your day.

Let us know what you find, because I need to replace my disk soon.

[prizrak]

It really depends on what you need. If you want slightly better perfomance and don't need as much storage get a 7200 RPM drive. If you need the space get the 5400 RPM drive.

[matthew]

I usually need more storage over speed, so I would go for the 160GB/5400.

Really, as others have said, it depends on your personal needs and usage habits.

[Bezmotivnik]

For me, increases in heat, noise and battery power consumption hugely and instantly overshadow any advantage in speed in a notebook drive.

[prizrak]

If you do a google search, someone did a comparison and produced nice charts comparing drive speeds vs CPU benchmarks.

Obviously 7200 will give you faster response. If you have 2GB of RAM then it doesn't matter. I have 1.25 GB of RAM and I have a 4200 RPM disk. But after 27 days of uptime, the memory is pretty full of the applications that I use, so drive speed is less of an issue.

On a laptop drive performance is more important than on a desktop with big RAM since they don't tend to stay up for days.

geekphreak,
Cache makes a bit of difference but not enough to level out rotation speeds. I'm surprised you can't find a 16MB cache laptop drive. I have seen quite a few of them since they tend to be slower they usually get more cache than desktop drives. Also as others have noted battery life will decrease with a faster drive, so if battery life is an issue grab the slower drive. What software do you normally use? I don't think you will see much difference if you are mostly doing IM/Web/E-mail. If you use something that uses the HDD alot frequently then speedier drive will be better.

[geekphreak]

Well, I can find 16 MB cache drives, but not that many. I will do more research to find benchmarks of 16MB cache 5400 rpm drives. Even though I do not use much space now, filling a drive up is usually not a big problem, so more space is never a bad thing. Also, I would not want my battery to drain much faster than what I am used to. Then there's heat and fans consequences...

As for the applications, I mainly use developer tools: On windows, it's Visual Studio 2005, Netbeans, Eclipse, RadRails, MySQL and MSSQL for development and testing. And stuff like Office 2007, media software and similar.
On Ubuntu, it is OO.o, Eclipse, Python dev tools, LAMP for development and testing, RadRails and similar apps.
Many of them are Java based, so they take up quite a bit of resources.

So I have decided that if I go with a 5400 rpm drive, I will need to get one with 16 MB cache.
But I am still researching 7200 rpm ones too.
Your guys' comments have been very helpful so far. Thanks!

[mips]

I'll go for the 7200rpm drive.

Hitachi Travelstar 2.5" drives are also better than Seagate 2.5" drives (The same is not true for 3.5" drives), this coming from people at data recovery companies I have sent a good few 2.5" seagate drives to.

[tgalati4]

I know that IBM Thinkpads use Travelstars and I'm not sure what goes in Lenovo notebooks these days. I've heard similar good things about Travelstar's reliability.

The Hitachi DeskStars are called DeathStars for good reason. They do have a good warranty, but that won't recover your data.