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Laptop hard drive... 5400 or 7200 ?

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f0dder:
A SATA2 drive should be able to connect on a SATA1 controller just fine, at "degraded speed"... but since no single drive can reach even SATA1 max speed sustained, well... :)

Armando:
Ok, thanks f0dder. I'll buy the Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 after all. It's 200gb, and there's a good deal on ebay... I'll try to order form the US and see if I can get lucky again  and save some tax money...  :P

Darwin : There's also a good price for the 200gb drive there : http://www.directcanada.com/search/?kw=Hitachi%20Travelstar%207K200

KenR:
The price is less on MWave (all other things being equal).

Ken

Armando:
Yes, the price is not bad. But do they ship worldwide (Canada) ? It doesn't look like it...

vegas:
Great! Another guinea pig (I hope)! As I've stated, I'm quite keen to see/read more real world/real user's experiences with the upgrade to a 7200.2 drive vs. 5400 rpm. For me to go down this road will involve ordering a drive and paying to have it shipped to me, so I want to be sure that it's going to be worth my while  ;) Thus, Ken and Armando, if either or you do this, please let us know how things turn out.

PS Thanks, vega, for already telling us about your experience. Would you mind elaborating on it a bit? For example, have you noticed a big difference in terms of battery life and heat dissipation? How about performance - how significant is the increase (yes, I know this is pretty subjective!)? What might be more interesting - from everyone who goes down this path - are the specs of the notebook that you upgraded. I'm considering doing this on a first generation Centrino with an anaemic 1.4Ghz PM processor and 2GB of 266MHz RAM. I'm wondering if the upgrade to a 7200.2 drive is going to benefit me that much given that the bottleneck on my system is the processor (not that I really suffer that much)...
-Darwin (December 29, 2007, 09:54 AM)
--- End quote ---

Not sure I even need to respond now, but why not.  Without changing other hardware, I had a much more responsive system with the new Seagate 7200 drive, launching of programs was much zippier, and transfers were faster than before.  I must note this was going from a 5400 ATA/IDE drive to a 7200 ATA/IDE drive.  Results may differ from SATA, but I would expect to see similar increases with the exception maybe being this new Samsung series of 5400RPM drives.  But if you are speaking of a generic 5400 drive (not a special series or premium drive) that comes with a standard laptop, you will no doubt see an increase in performance.  A side note, Seagate drives come with a 5-year warranty, but most people typically upgrade laptops every 2-4 years, so if that even matters as drives will be even faster (or of a different interface) by then.  I ordered a $17 external enclosure for my former 5400 80gb drive, so I could make some use of it yet.

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