New owner with question about hdd speed

Hello I am new to these forums and I just recently purchased a m11x r1. I knew it would be cheaper to get the base and upgrade myself but I did upgrade the ram to 4gb. So the only thing needed to be done is the HDD upgrade but my current one is plenty of room but it only runs at 5400 Rpm rather than 7200. Is this worth while to upgrade. I guess my question is does the hard drive RPM effect speed of the computer drastically?

 

for me, 7200 RPM is a worthwhile upgrade over 5400, but i suppose if you've only had 5400 RPM HDDs, you can't really miss what you've never had. there absolutely is a noticeable difference though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9f8fKn40kk

 

Agreed. There's a very noticeable difference between 5400 and 7200 rpm hdds. Loading windows, apps, games, installations and etc are all affected. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of you-know-what.

 

Yes, hard drive speed is largely determined by the RPM of the drive, and has a huge impact on the speed of the computer. Upgrading your HDD from 5400rpm to a faster model will affect just about everything you do with your computer.

The drive you buy as an upgrade will depend largely on your budget.

~$70 USD will get you a 7200rpm 500GB mechanical hard drive, like a Hitachi 7K500 or a Western Digital Scorpio Black. Either one will be a noticeable improvement over a 5400rpm hard drive.

~$120 USD will get you a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. It is a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive, paired with 4GB of NAND flash memory. The drive uses a caching algorithm to load your most commonly accessed data in that 4GB of flash memory. This overall leads to a very noticeable improvement over a traditional 7200rpm mechanical HDD. The Seagate Momentus XT is one of the most popular drives among members of this forum, because of the great balance is strikes between price, performance, and storage capacity.

~$200 USD will get you a top-end 120GB Solid State Disk (SSD), like an OCZ Vertex 2 120GB or an Intel X25-M 120GB. An SSD is made entirely of flash memory, and has no moving parts. The end result is a drive that has absolutely no equal when it comes to performance. In many areas that matter to your computer's overall performance (Random 4KB read times, I/O's per second), an SSD is literally 100x faster than either traditional mechanical HDD's or the Seagate Momentus XT. SSD's are also extremely popular among members of this forum. You pay higher prices per GB of storage, and get less overall storage than cheaper HDD's. But you get absolutely unparalleled performance. Check out the two videos in my signature for what you can expect out of an SSD, if you are considering buying one.

 

Okay thank you all very much. Now when i receive my m11x tmrw i have to replace the hard drive =(. Oh and one other newbie question for you guys.. Do i need to back up the alienware programs such as FX and stuff before restoring windows 7 on a new hard drive?

 

you could just clone the original drive

 

Nice summary kent1146! Thanks.

 

Thanks Kent for the reccomendation. Just ordered my momentus xt from amazon for $100 and it came with a free transfer kit that originally cost $40.

 

UH OH one more important question. The data transfer kit that came with it says it will not work with dells because of their media direct bios routine. I was going to be doing this with a Alienware but now that they are made by dell does that mean i will have that issue?

 

It's a little more work, but I highly recommend using the process detailed here to get a fresh install of Windows 7:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/472940-guide-m11x-creating-recovery-usb-key.html

This guide can help you to restore the "look and feel" of the m11x after reinstalling Windows.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ook-feel-after-clean-install-windows-7-a.html