7200rpm Vs 5400rpm HD paired with a M-Sata

So in my laptop I have my Msata which is my OS drive and my Original 750GB Hitachi 7200rpm in the regular hard drive space, Well lately perfomace has degreded even with Clean installs and I think it HAS a LOT to do with the Hard Drive, Before I got the M-Sata my Computer was sluggish even with a clean install and I think the hard drive is failing I store about 300GB of stuff on it works fine but seems SLOW sometimes.

But the Question here is would It slow anything to Swap it out with a known good working Western Digital 5400rpm drive? would I notice a big difference in games That I store on it? And would it affect windows in anyway since windows is not stored on it?

 

Anyone? Sorry Just wanting to do this tonight

 

Well if the drive is dying anything is going to be better... when exactly are you seeing performance issues if your Windows installation is on the mSATA drive?

 

I had performace issues when transfering files between the HD and SSD and playing games like WoW would sometimes studder on the HD

 

As far as i know performance of games have nothing to do with HDD or SSD, they are dependant on GPU and CPU, you can only increase load times not fps or performance. Once the game is started, it has nothing to do with HDD.

 

Before you give up on your HDD:

Run a thorough error check on it. Right click on the drive in explorer and select Tools and select Error Checking and select all available check boxes. This will take a long time...

With the error check completing successfully, defrag the drive with a trial version of PerfectDisk's defragment software using the SmartPlacement option. Make sure you also do an offline/boot time defrag too (followed by another SmartPlacement defrag to fully defrag the drive).

Finally - if you are only using ~300GB out of 750GB on your Hitachi... with Windows 7 or 8, go to Disk Management and Shrink the partition down so that you have around 50GB free space on the drive. If you can't shrink the partition (Windows will complain it can't...) then use PerfectDisk to compact the drive so that you can shrink to as small as you want it to.


With all the above done - your system should perform much, much better - assuming that simple HDD maintenance was all it needed to begin with.

Good luck.

 

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You can try those among others. 5400 RPM will yield a difference v.s. 7200 RPM, but platter density makes a difference in read times as well.

 

I know The HD wont give me better FPS thats what my Nvidia 2gb 650m is for haha

But so Shrinking the volume to that drive will make it go better?

 

It doesn't concern WoW, but depending on your power settings, the drive may shut off after some time of not being used and when accessing it after that, stuttering is to be expected as the drive "wakes up". You can usually hear the drive wake up when that happens though. I don't think that this is your issue, but just throwing this out there in case.