Upgrading hard drive to improve performance?

Hey I have a Dell XPS M1330 with the NVIDIA 8400M GS graphics. I just put in 4GB of ram, from my original 2GB. That gave me a slight performance boost in games, but now I'm wondering if I upgrade my hard drive from 5400RPM to 7200RPM, will that help out in games like BF2 and Guitar Hero III? Thanks

 

It would improve load times. In the end, the GPU is going to be the bottleneck, no matter how amazing the other components are.

 

Not much at all in terms of in game performance. HD speeds are overrated for gaming. Main thing is just to keep your hard drive defragmented.

 

The hard drive generally has nothing to do with the in-game performance; it will only improve the loading times as noted.

A 7200RPM drive is a great upgrade for system performance though. Considering that the hard drive is 1000X slower than the next-slowest component (which is memory), any increase in speed is going to be noticeable.

 

Thanks for all the feedback, I've got another question, I've heard that some hard drives employ a different recording technique like parallel recording or something like that. I think I remember seeing someone that said a 160GB 5400RPM hard drive with parallel recording is as fast as a 7200RPM hard drive? Did I hear right, or am I making this stuff up?

 

Perpendicular recording. Yes and most of the newer drives already have this feature. Perpendicular recording effectively increased the amount of data you can store into a disk a great amount. It basically stores more data in an area making it easier and thus faster for the hard drive to read data. Think of placing a tall building where there was only one house.

7200 rpm vs 5400 is up in there. Some people claim big difference, some marginal, and other minimal. I am in the latter catergory. Regardless of my opinion, there are such things as platter density to take into account. Its basically the idea of how much data in one place I was talking about. A 160 gb vs 120 will have a higher platter density making easier for the HD to read. Overall though you can conclude that the speed of the HD will not effect gaming much at all. Though yes the speed of starting up programs and booting the computer MAY be affected. I personally believe 7200 rpms are overrated but some people can't live without them.

Time for UFC but there are plenty of threads on these forums and the internet of the differences. Theres even a HD benchmark thread on the forums titled HD tune I believe and that should give you an idea in terms of numbers of the differences.

 

You probably won't notice it if you don't pay attention. Main difference is boot times. Of course you wouldn't touch a 5400 drive on a desktop but since 7200 are pricy for laptops, a 5400 RPM does the job.<

I don't see much difference between my C90S drive and my desktop 250GB 7200RPM one

 

I used a 5400 drive for 2 months.. recently upgraded to 7200 and everything is a lot faster. I can share the same comments as others.. in game performance is minimal, but to me, I enjoy faster boot up times, faster response times when loading applications. I'm in and out of a lot of apps throughout the day so I like it when things pop up before my finger is off the mouse. Not a necessary upgrade but you will notice things are snappier.

 

Which hard drive are you using? Is it the Hitachi 200GB 7200RPM?

 

Well my HDs acess time is comparable to 7200s though they usually are a bit better.

 

What is your access time and hard drive that you are currently using? I just ran a HD Tune test on my hard drive, a Hitachi 120GB 5400RPM and got the following results (in the picture attached)

 

My acess time. is 15.7 where alot of the 7200s are in the 14.5 to low 15 range. My transfer rates are similar to yours while the burst rates are much higher. (though not as important)

Its definitely faster than most of the other 5400s. Forgot to mention its a seagate 160 gb.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=138761&page=8

 

One key aspect is like what The Forerunner mentioned: keep the disk defragmented. Personally I tried to look for real numbers in this forums rather than the 'my new 7200 HD is much faster than the 5400'. Sincerely, there are very number you can extract and even less to compare.

The bottomline is that while there is an increase in speed, it is really marginal (look for the sticky on 5400 vs 7200 HD on page 6-8 for a comparison between two HD's). Also, when some people say that they notice a huge difference: were its previous 5400 drive defragmented? Did they put ALL the same files on their new 7200 or only what is esential so that now they say there is a huge difference? As you will notice almost no one states that in their comments, making this subject very subjective without the help of some numbers.

 

What is a good defragmentor? I currently have Auslogics Disk Defragmentor, is this a good one or are there better ones out there?

 

I am not sure. I use JKDefrag (its free, just google it). I read somewhere (sorry, I don't remember) that is a very good (and free) defragmenter since it defragments and optimize (that is: joins together the programs and order all programs) the HD. The basic difference with the windows defragmenter is that JKDefrag also optimizes.

I hope this can help.

 

Just a little bit of closure, I went ahead and bought the Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 160GB hard drive. Tested it with HD Tune, and there is a significant speed increase over my original 5400RPM hard drive. I am very happy with this hard drive, I have definitely noticed a speed increase in everything I do.

First picture is the 5400 one, second is the 7200 one.

Also, I swear by JkDefrag now, it is awesome.

 

Here's a review of free defraggers. They will all do they job well. None of them isn't really much better than the other, so use the one you like the most. I also use Auslogics, since I like it's GUI, simplicity and speed.

 

Here's something interesting, I put my old Hitachi 120GB 5400RPM hard drive in an external enclosure, USB2.0, and ran HDTune on it, here's the results...

I would have thought for sure that it would have been a lot slower than when it was in my computer, but I guess not.

 

I use vista degragger. I usually start up the defrag, and then open task manager and up the priority of the degrag.exe.