Is the 120 gb5400rpm harddrive fast as the 60 gb 7200rpm?

Is the 120 gb5400rpm harddrive fast as the 60 gb 7200rpm?
Cause if they are about the same speed, i would opt for the twice bigger harddrive

 

It all depends on your usage. If you feel you need more space, get the bigger hard drive. The 7200 Hard drive will give you better performance though. I opted for the bigger, slightly slower hard drive with my M170. I think its too inconvenient having to lug around an external drive.

 

The 7200 rpm drive will be (possibly significantly) faster than the 5400 rpm drive. If you can live with 60 GB of space, then I would go with the faster drive, but if you need a bunch of space, you'll have to go with the 120 GB drive.

 

The number equals the revolutions per minute (RPM) so the bigger the number the faster the drive. Some higher end drives do have faster seek speeds than others (I've read that the Seagate Momentus for one) so with some tasks it's possible for the 5400rpm to be equally fast, but that is the exception...not the rule.

If you have money to burn, buy a bigger 7200 drive - if you're not doing heavy editing (ie some editing programs REQUIRE a 7200rpm drive) or gaming though the 5400RPM will be fine.

 

The 7200 rpm will generate more heat though....

 

And will get slightly worse battery life as well - about 15-25 minutes off of a 5400RPM drive.

 

Well I think the 100GB 5400 is a nice choice because its cheaper, and uses less energy. Also the 100GB has a 8MB cahce that helps to offset its slowish RPM.

Also because it holds more data per platter, the arm doesn't have to move as much to access that data, which speeds things up a bit.

 

Made this tradeoff myself. Went with the 120GB 5400rpm drive over the 60GB 7200rpm. Figured the space was worth more to me than the speed. Also, read a paper from Maxtor that compared performance of 7200rpm vs 5400rpm for set-top boxes and verdict was 7200 was overkill unless you had some application that really, really needed the speed. Since I ended up getting the E1705 with the downgraded gfx card (ATI x1400), the 7200 was overkill and more space was more important.

Also, there is a slight performance gain on larger drives vs. smaller drives of the same speed; and there is a slight power and heat savings with the slower drive.

 

^What he said.

 

I got the 100 GB 7200 HD over the 120 GB 5400 RPM HD for 'performance'. I don't know exactly where the HD sits in the laptop but the Temp reading is 33 degrees Celcius.

I will tell you that my 9 cell battery with light intensity down to minimum gives me 8:30 of cordless time and 4:30 with wifi on and brightness set to automatic ambient adjustment.

There is a noticeable difference in the performance of a 7200 over a 4200 RPM configuration. I have not run benchmarks for direct comparison; however, the time for transferring files of large sizes takes a fraction of the time it would take when I used my old system.

New system: Dell D620, 7200 RPM 100 GB HD
Old: Dell 6000, 4200 RPM, 60 GB HD

 

However, the difference between the 4200 and 5400 is more significant than the difference between the 5400 and 7200.

 

This is a popular misconception, but not completely untrue.

Faster spindle speeds DO NOT equal faster transfer rates... contrary to popular belief. The purpose of faster spindle speeds is to "even out" the performance curve as one writes data farther to the outside of the platter, or the partition ( one of the reason partitioning is so popular amont enthusiasts)

You see.. data closer to the inner most portion of the drive is "more accessable" The head doesnt need to move as far, and it gathers more data between sectors a and b , than it does b and c, c and d, and so on. Put simply more data is stored closer together, the closer you are the the inner-most portion of the drive. The farther out you write, the more farther out the head has to travel during EVERY ACCESS to the drive, and that data takes longer to retrieve. Example, The data between sectors a and b, is more than sectors y and z, and its a shorter distance to travel to get that data. Understand?

Everyone has experienced it., on any OS, on any Hardware platform. Fresh OS install and wow, your zoomin, then you add office, disk slows down a little, then you add photoshop, slows just a little more. You add a few games, 10GB MP3's.. man, now its gettin slower.

Faster spindle speeds makes the access curve go from a complete 90 degree angle, to a little more transgressed curve. Even though this does equate to "better performance", this is only true for much larger drives, for those who do not partition off their primary, programs, data, and swap. The problem with Hard drives is the technology itself, its over 20 years old.

So get that 100GB 5400, and partition it up a bit. You will see better performance, and a more economical choice.

 

if you interested in games copying dvds and cds and want a desktop performance HDD? 7K is u r choice.
want a home office HDD for more space and less price get 5K.

 

Uhh..

If you are interested in Games, get better GPU, CPU, More Ram. Hard Drive should be at the bottom of the list unless you plan on swapping out textures. At that point, the speed of the drive still wont make a lick of difference as your framrates still drop every time you access the drive.

If you are interested in copying DVD's and CD's, Im not sure how a 7200RPM drive is going to benefit you as overburn technology has all but completely solved buffer underrun problems, not to mention even a 4200rpm drive is capable of delivering data faster than the drive can burn it.

And im sorry, but you will never get desktop performance out of a laptop hard drive. Its physically impossible. You might believe the hype, but real numbers dont lie. Do the test yourself.

Remembe 4200, 5400, 7200 all pertain to sustained transferr rates as you write farther to the end of the drive. Not FASTER DRIVES!!!

5400 is PERFECT for Games, Movies, and Storage. You cant go wrong unless you just want to throw away money on Ego, which is all 7200 rpm drives are, that and alot of heat.

 

Those HDS a radically different. Small and faster vs. larger and fast enough. It all depends on what your going to do with it. You can always get what you need now and swap an HD later if its not enough or to slow.

 

To answer your question, a 60Gig 7200RPM hard drive is significantly faster than a 120Gig 5400RPM drive for 2 major reasons. One the disk turns considerably faster making getting from point A to point B on the drive take considerably less time. The smaller capacity drive is also again going to be faster because your going to have less data or garbage on the drive for the system to have to search through and manage. I like the balance of ample space and better response times of the 80Gig 7200RPM drive myself.

If you need more space than 80Gig then what you really need to do is learn how to better manage your data and toss out old garbage you no longer need to be carrying around with you, not to mention spending a little time learning about file compression.

If your storing 120Gig of data on a slower 5400 RPM drive your not saving anything at all on battery life and power consumption. You'll have to recharge that same battery 3 times just to complete simple system maintanence tasks like disk defrag and complete virus scans. A slower system is also going to have to be turned on longer to complete the same tasks. The longer the system is turned on the more power gets drained not just from the hard drive but all the other devices that have to be on with it.

Though, in reality your general question can't actually be answered by anyone without a little important detail you left out. What type of or how is the hard drives are you comparing tied into the rest of the system?

IDE Ultra ATA100?
IDE Ultra ATA133?
Serial ATA150?
SATA 3.0Gb/s?

A 60G 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s is going to be substantialy more responsive and noticeable to you than a 120G 5400RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 would be.

I wouldn't even make the amount of cache on the hard drive part of my consideration on a modern system. If you need more hard drive space though for what ever reason, then it's that much more of a reason why you also need a faster hard drive to get through all that garbage your storing on your system. If I had to choose between just those options though of size or performance, I'd easily go with performance any day of the week. There are many better options out there for storing and carrying around any extra data you feel you have the need to lug around with you like multi Gig flash memory drives that easily fit in your pocket or DL DVD's you can just leave in the DVD drive. If your traveling with your laptop you have your case with you as well, how much extra space and weight does carrying a DL DVD around with you actually take up?

A more important consideration should instead be the type of drive your considering, SATA 3.0Gb/s is going to be a much better option than even a drive only capable of Serial ATA150.

 

I don't believe it does any good what so ever to partion off a seperate area dedicated to just swap if it's on the same physical hard drive. To achieve any benefits from haveing a seperate partition dedicated to just swap performance it needs to be on a second physical drive. An option that would be nice if laptops had actually, you'd not only be able to have a second drive for data storage and backup purposes, but you'd also then be able to utilize RAID 0 or 1 for either further performance or reliability of safe data storage and back ups where you actually need it the most, on a system your traveling with often without a server to back up onto, also tossing and bumping around where your drive and the data on it is most likely to experience damage.

Power consumption and battery life are at just about the furthest point in my list of concerns though. I'll sacrafice battery life for performance and reliability any day of the week. We've all done away with floppy drives, what's really reclaimed this prime real estate that's been left inside the case in it's absence? A second internal Hard Drive with Raid Capabilites would be perfect.

 

I just got an E1505, and went with the 80GB 5400RPM. I believe on a laptop, unless you are doing really big stuff all the time, 5400RPM is just fine. Also, the price jump between a decent 5400RPM and 7200RPM is pretty decent.

There is no argument that there is an increase, it's a matter of whether or not its worth the $$. And in my opinion, as of now, the answer is no.

 

DoubleBlack,
I think the E1505 is an excellant choice for the price and the upgrade option for that model to go from a 5400 to a 7200 RPM drive is over $100. If I was on a set amount I had available for my purchase I'd likely put that same $100 towards a better processor or Video option if I was stripped down to only the most basic of other options I needed to keep the price down and had $100 left over to spend on it. If I was satisfied with the processor and video option I had already selected though and chose many other add on options, I'd look at what add on options I could remove to go with the 7200 drive myself.

By no means though think I meant to imply your getting an inferior system by settleing for the 5400 RPM drive instead. You'll be just fine with that choice and very happy with it. My point was only that it is faster (which was the original question) and there are other factors to consider like what type of drive are you comparing. In your case Dell only refers to all of the options in the B1505 as "SATA" for your model, which could mean several things, though if it was SATA 3.0Gb/s this would be a selling feature and you could guarantee they would note it as so. I'd always choose SATA 3.0Gb/s despite the speed or size of the drive if another option was listed as only being Serial ATA or SATA which I'll guess to mean most likely Serial ATA150.

If price is what your searching for, then absolutely, go with the 5400RPM drive and you'll be happy with it. If performance is what your after, then you need to make sure you cover all the performance options in your selection of hardware options, i.e. better processor, better RAM, better hard drive, better video. It would make little sense to upgrade some options in the hopes of achieving better performance and then overlook all the right options to go along with it.

The E1505 is a smart choice for the price in my book, I almost bought that one myself thinking Dell stopped making the Latitude line I've always used till I found them listed in a seperate part of their web site while shopping for a new one. You'd think a link that says "Compare ALL Notebooks" would actualy take you to a place on their web site that listed ALL notebooks.

 

Like I got a:

Core Duo T2400
512MB RAM (Bought 2GB from NewEgg for $120)
DVD+/-RW
80GB SATA 5400RPM
256MB X1400
Truelife
6 Cell and 9 Cell Battery
Upgraded Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

For $1050 so that's pretty good. I had the M140, but am returning it because I needed the decent graphics. Although I don't like the size increase, I had to bite the bullet. I'll miss the size of the M140, but I'm looking forward to the preformance boost, specifically the dedicated graphics.

 

The compromise would be the one I ordered: 100gb at 7200rpm. Loads my photoshop pictures like a hurricane!

 

Which would be nice, but it costs a pretty penny!

 

You can always go with the cheapest Hard Drive Dell offers, then buy a second 7200RPM larger drive at newegg for a lot less money than the upgrade options and end up with 2 drives instead for less than the cost of upgrading to just one.

Just pull the new cheaper drive out and set it aside, plug in the new drive, install your operating system fresh on the new better drive and all your drivers etc...

If something ever happened to this aftermarket drive like a catastrophic disaster of some sort, you'd still have that second drive that originaly came with your system stored away in your underware drawer that you could just pop in and away you go.

I didn't do this because I already have too many extra drives and parts around here, plus, after you've done countless installs on new drives and systems it begins to lose the fun aspect of doing it after a while like it had the first few times you did it. Saving $100 wasn't worth spending the time for me.

The desktop PC I happen to be on right now has two 10K RPM 40Gig Drives on it running under a RAID 0 configuration for a year now and I've yet to even fill up half of a 40Gig drive, and I thought I was bad about storing old junk on it I don't need.

My old laptop I just finally retired and replaced with a new Dell Latitude B820 was an old Dell Lattitude CS that only has like an 8Gig Hard Drive running Windows 2000 Pro. That thing was a lesson in proper data management for me for sure. Since Dell made that particular model at the time to be as light and portable as possible it doesn't have any extra drives like no CD drive, no floppy etc... so everything did have to be loaded on it across the network by copying CD's over to it, running the installation, then deleteing the installation files to recover the room. That thing was a constant chore for me to keep that little hard drive under the 3/4 full mark and when your running a Windows OS system and start filling up your drive over the 3/4 full mark your just asking for problems, trust me on that one, seen it too many times.

 

I agree and disagree with this. (No, Im not John Kerry)

Actually, partitioning does help. When you access the drive, it has to cover the entire span of data on that partition. This means, if you have one partition from the front to the back of the drive, as far out as the data is on that partition is how far out the head will travel, each time the drive is accessed.

However,

If you put your data / Swap on seperate partitions, you "increase" (term used loosely) the performance because the head is not forced to travel that much further during every read / write execution on that partition.

I do agree that a 2nd drive is by far, better than partitioning but for the same reason. However IDE / SATA are single threaded IO. This means that data can only be read / written one at a time per controller, not device. This is more of an issue for IDE as 2 devices on the Primary / Secondary controller share that task. Another reason why SCSI is "better technology" as the drives and controllers are multithreaded IO. They can read and write data simultaniously. (sorry, my spelling stinks)

IMO the best way to increase swap performance is to get a 2GB compact flash card and just drop it on that.... they are very cheap now BTW.

Again, 7200RPM Drives to not make the drives "faster" Its only purpose is to even out the performance curve as you write data farther to the outside of the drive. You still loose performance as you write, just not as bad. Some drives just perform better because... they are better drives. I have seen 7200 RPM Samsung Drives give Raptors a **** good run for its money. I agree raptors are fast drives, however, I have some 160GB 7200RPM 16M Cache drives that give them a great run for the money, and they are 1/3 the price.

The true bottleneck here is Drive techonolgy, Single threaded IO, and the controllers themselves. Dont get cought up in the "bigger is better" scam as Its often not the case.

 

i go the 100gig 7200rpm harddrive but how do i really know if a 7200?