Disk Drive Speeds and Performance

There is a lot of conversation when buying a new notebook about performance upgrades. Processors and memory get most of the attention but the speed of the drive is also very important. So the question is usually a size vs speed one. Anyway, here's a great article about the three main drive and speed sizes that is a must read for any new notebook buyer.

http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20031031/index.html

Updated Link 5/24/05
http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20041213/index.html

 

Thanks for the link to that article, in my search for a laptop I had wanted to find a 7200 RPM drive, seems like most places don't even say what speed drive they offer or the only option I see is 5400...

?? for Brian or anyone else... what makers allow you to choose a 7200 rpm drive in the options of building their notebooks?

Bill

 

Many do...Fujitsu, Dell, IBM, I'm sure most others as well.

Editor in Chief http://www.bargainPDA.com and http://www.SPOTstop.com

 

just to add to brian's post, i've seen configurable options on the toshiba.com site (mostly in the business class series only). An interesting option too are the Asus barebones models, which often have several different hard drive manufacturers, sizes and speed types to choose from.

best regards

 

yeah i bought the Dell 5150 when it frist was released, having a 3.06 with 512mb of ram a radeon 9000 64mb was GREAT... but the 5400rpm HD is a huge bottleneck. so much so that i run games off a firewire external, now i want to find a 7200drive to replace this one, and ill use the original 4300 in an external enclosure.

 

FTLOSM
The HDD is the bottleneck of any computer Desktop or Laptop, it is 1000 times slower than the RAM, so so increasing the speed of your hard disk will increase the overall perfomance of the system in most sensitive way. 7200 RPM HDD is some 5-15% faster than 5400 RPM HDD,and 25-30% than 4200. So if u are used to the speed of 4200 changing to 7200 RPM disk man u think your pc is flying. And actually i know two manifactures that are produceing 7200 RPM HDD so far
Hitach and Toshiba
the secon one toke his 7200rpm disk on the market befor a month so its still very rare to find Toshiba 7200 HDD ,even if it has 16Mb !!! cache. The Hitachi is available almost a year and it's very good, i bought before 10 months such a disk it's fast scilent , and is consuming the same amount of energy as the other 4200RPM disks.
Check this out

http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/hgst/?epi_menuItemID=0f34be57a7adb6fd25ad4e8060e4f0a0&epi_menuID=f3422d6ea3268f8d5f5a530560e4f0a0&epi_baseMenuID=22f0deefa8f3967dafa0466460e4f0a0

As for Toshiba i don't know what is going to be the perfomance gain of the 16MB cache, time will show
cya

 

HD speed isn't that important, even to many gamers. After the game loads, the hard drive speed has nothing to do with the framerate.

Dell 8600
1.8 dothan SXGA+
128mb radeon 9600PRO TURBO
512mb RAM

 

hi andrew,
with 512 MB RAM try to play UT2004, u ll see, i dont thinkthat is going run so smooth
robert

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Robko

 

I would disagree with the fact that harddrive speed and memory speed don't affect game play. Some games don't deal properly with memory and youend up getting improvments with more memory. Both in load time and lag issues if it is a online game. Hard drive speed would do the same thing. If it is constantly reading information off the hard drive then having a faster hard drive would also give improved performance.

 

I agree with you jason54, It is not like Andrew said. When the games start they do not load the entire game into memory, they only load a portion into memory and load more as the game progresses(unless you create a RAM drive in memory the same size as the CD and put an image of the game in it). So the speed of the hard drive affects the performance of the game throughout. This is why most gamers use alcohol 120%, so they can copy a CD image from the CD onto a hard drive and play the game from the hard drive. The hard drive won't affect the frame rate overall, but when a new texture or portion of the game needs to be loaded a slow drive can stop everything until it copies the data into memory.

Jack

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by jason54

 

HD is important my is so fuggin slow!!!
i knew i should have spurged for the 30gb HD at 5400 RPM.. lol its lamost funny now

 

I recently changed my old ibm HD and i can see the speed of my laptop speed up.



www.ComputerOfAmerica.com <---best computers in the world

 

Guys, sorry for the stupid question. Where can I check the speed of my HD? Is there some sort of software that I have to install to check this?

 

How new is your computer? Check the specifications in the manual or check the manufacturers website.

 

M6809. I have not found anything that specifies the speed of HD.

 

The HD speed is 4200 RPM.

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>What game uses the hard drive during gameplay? ANY hard drive is dreadfully slow--for gameplay-- and would lag if they accessed it during gameplay. <hr height='1' noshade id='quote'></font id='quote'></blockquote id='quote'>

Almost all games use the hard drive a little durring gameplay. I can name many off the top of my head. Sim City 4, SW:KotOR, WC3 (sometimes), the list goes on. Mainly the larger and more computer intensive games would moslty benefit from a faster hard drive.

Also, have you ever been playing a game and had to minimize to do something? If there is an intensive game running, most of the RAM is full, so when you minimize, Windows has to copy a good portion of your game files to the Swap portion of the hard drive to clear space in the RAM for temporary Windows working.

While hard drive speed will not effect frame rates, it will effect game loading time, level loading time, loading stuff in the game, etc. It all depends on what the game needs, how it's programmed, and how the user is using it. For games, a better graphics card will help more than a faster hard drive, but in many cases, a slow hard drive can slow down gamming, whether it effects frame rates or not.

 

ahhh My first post !!

Out of all the games I've played - I've found SIM CITY4 to regularly access the pagefile - when the city gets over 300,000 residents. (In Athlon XP3000 with 1 gig Ram !!)

any how - Good old diskpeed32 is a small app to measure real world HDD performance (not as flashy as some-but does the job)

http://www.geocities.com/vgrinenko/DiskSpeed32/

[8]

 

Hey guys. I am thinking about buying an external USB 2.0 hard drive. Does it make sense to buy the one with 7200rpm? Suppose that I have 5400rpm disk and I am copying a movie from a DVD disk to the external hard drive, what is the bottleneck in the data transmission - 5400rpm or the USB? (assume that DVD is being read faster so DVD reader is not the bottleneck)

 

Hey bootleg, maybe you wanna start another benchmark thread using diskspeed32 since that SuperPi thread you started was/is so popular.

*******************************************************
Fujitsu S6210: 1.6Ghz PM ~ 768MB RAM ~ 60GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
*******************************************************

 

Drive speed does make a difference. I used to play everquest on a system with slow IDE drives and loading took forever. When I got my workstation with fast SCSI drives, the load time dropped from minutes to seconds. If you've already maxed the ram on your system and still aren't happy with the speed, then faster drives might be what you need to make your computing life bearable again.

 

True, you can go all the way to 15,000RPM for a SCSI harddrive, and that isn't a typo. But, I'm not aware of a notebook w/ scsi controller, nor a 2.5" notebook size scsi harddrive.
<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by animekenji

 

I agree a little bit to Andrew. I think there is no meaning to have a notebook that has a 7200 rpm without ati or nvidia gpu card. So how can u talk about fast? what is the fast meaning without a good gpu?
Although the battery life will be less with 7200 rpm.But of course
with enought gpu and 7200 rpm will be good asset when we compare 5400 and 4200,so

conc:If we talk about fast,we talk about whole of system.
gpu,hdd,ram,cpu...all of them tie inside...



Fujitsu-Siemens AMILO M 1420,1.7 dathon,1 gb ram,ati 9600pro 128,crystal bright+15,4 WXGA over 22 million

http://www.notebooksbilliger.de/images/m1420_big.jpg

 

I would say that hard drive speed is very important when plying games, games dont actually run of the hard drive but with load times it would be nice to not have to look at a load screen for a minute, with vice city if you have a hard drive any slower that 4200rpm then it will take at least a minute to load,

When playing a game the amount of memory you have can affect it, in games like battlefield the more memory you have the better, but in some other games memory really doesn't effect the game play.
I believe that if games have more interactable objects that the memory demand from the game will be higher so i dont think it will hurt to have more memory,

Cam

 

hey, im interested in buying this drive for my Dell 8600:
Hitachi 60GB 7200RPM Notebook Hard Drive, Model HTS726060M9AT00

Newegg seems to have the best price, but are their any store retailers that carry this so I can check for deals on black friday???

 

ZipZoomFly is another one...

Editor in Chief http://www.bargainPDA.com and http://www.SPOTstop.com

 

hey, what do you guys think of this deal? Seems like a really cheap way to get some some added RAM until I can afford a better upgrade. Any opinions? Here is the link:

http://www.oempcworld.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=128M-SO2700

 

oempcworld has great memory!

Jack

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" (Ben Franklin)
http://pbase.com/joneill

 

My cousin bought a new laptop and it sports all the new power saving features etc well just one problem. when you are playing a game like medal of honor allied assualt it loads and runs perfectly almost flawlessly if you will but, because if these power saving features it slows down the hardrive when it is fully loaded and when it needs to load something new like a explosion sound you will hear it start to spin fast again and it will play the sound does anyone know how i can fix this i have looked in all the obvious places to change it but to no avil

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by The Grim

 

Back on topic then...

A question - in desktop hard drives, many times larger capacities (or just newer drives in general) that spin slower than older faster spinning drives can make up the difference in speed because of cache or their increased data density. I was looking at the new acer sonoma laptop that comes with a 100gb hard drive, but I was wanting a 7200 rpm drive. Would a 60gb 7200rpm drive be significantly faster than a 100gb, or only slightly?

 

Wyrm, The easiest way I know to check your harddrive speed is to look in device manager for your harddrive, copy the model to your clip board then paste in google. I've learned through personal experience not to trust a salesmens word on harddrive speeds, if they aren't sure, most well tell you what they think you want to hear in they're single minded effort to make a sale. I had to return my last Fujitsu N6010 to Fry's because it was misrepresented as a 5400rpm when in fact it was a 4200rpm.

 

[ ]
My first post...
Only thing I can say about the 7k60 Travelstar is...Phenomenal.

When I bought my zd7000 series, I made the decision of horsepower over "fuel economy" in other words I knew I would never be far from an outlet, so I just plug the fire breathing monster in wherever I go. APC has a 140W inverter at CompUSA for 40 bucks, get those while they last.

Anyway, my zd7010 was equipped with a 4200rpm drive when I bought it, 60gig. I watched the 7k60 prices carefully on eBay and pricegrabber until it turned out ZipZoomfly.com had one for around 150. At that price it is a no brainer. I can tell you my cold startup speed is incredible. I haven't actually timed it but seat of the pants tells me the time dropped by more than 30%. Just for fun I like to reboot my computer in front of several people (Starbucks, friends, etc) just to see the reaction. Most of the time the reaction is "that boots faster than my desktop".

If you are considering the upgrade, watch the prices carefully, they fluctuate weekly. If you are concerned about only being able to get a 60GB drive @ 7200RPM and need more space, drop your old drive in an enclosure and carry that as an external.

Hope this helps!

 

I think I'll wait for the solid-state drives...

[ ]

 

so is the hitachi drive any louder than your old drive?

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by amber4767

 

On the lower half of this webpage you can see how much difference there is in hard drives:

http://www.barefeats.com/pb12.html

It is very considerable.

17" Powerbook 1.5 Ghz, Vaio T250 1.2 Ghz

 

any sites or stores where one can buy a 7200rpm notebook hard drive?

 

Very informative thread. It sounds like you don't lose much battery time with a faster hard drive, but is there a limitation to putting a 7200 rpm HD into some laptops because of the extra heat generated?

 

Back in January I posted this personal benchmark data on the zv5000z forum.

"I just completed a benchmark test on the three drives for my notebook. I use the notebook for my video editing with Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. After you have a finished project in the Timeline Window you can export the whole project in many different formats. One format that is a highly disk intensive is just to export the whole movie as a single .avi file. Here are the results of the time it took to export my very short test file with three different speed disk drives.

Hitachi "7K60" 60 GB 7200 rpm 13 seconds
Seagate "Momentus 5400.2" 100 GB 5400 rpm 18 seconds
Hitachi "HP original equipment" 40 GB 4200 rpm 23 seconds

(Exporting to mpeg is more CPU intensive than disk intensive, very little difference was noticed.)"

Bill :::: zv5000z :: 3200+ :: 1GB :: 100GB 5400rpm :: 15.4" WSXGA+ (1680x1050) :: XP Pro

 

I installed the 7K 60gig from Hitachi and optimized Windows, using the guide from this forum. The zv6005us boot in 59 seconds. Big improvement over the 4200rpm drive. It really improves load times in HL2.

Cope
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
John 15:13
HP ZV6005us
-AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0GHz
-2048MB 2700RAM
-128MB ATI Mobility radeon X200m
-60GB 7200RPM HDD
-15.4" Widescreen w/ Brightview
-DVD±RW W/DL support
-XP Home
-8-Cell Battery

 

Well i'd suggest to stay with 5400 for current purchasers (for best value). THen wait for HDDs with 7200 + 80-100GB storage to come out in the coming month.

As someone has pointed out before, 7200 RPM drives' prices are shooting up sharply. Why not let the price drop a little...? and buy the HDD and install it when it gets a bit cheaper?

 

Twin HGST 7K100 (100GB/7200RPM) drives in my M70, very noticeable improvement over 4200/5400RPM drives.

 

I would suggest going to www.newegg.com, they have a great selection of notebook hard drives. Check the link.
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=380

 

How do you actually install a faster HD? I just got the zv6000 w/ a 100GB HD (4200 rpm), and I want to upgrade it to a 5400 rpm HD.


Thanks in advance,
AI



-----------
HP zv6000
AMD Athlon 64 2.4 GHz 4000+
1 GB of RAM
100 HD (4200)
128 MB ATI Video Graphics
8x DVD+/-RW
15.4 inch w/ Brightview
12 Cell Battery

 

Better yet, install a 60GB Hitachi 7K60 7200RPM drive, and keep the 100GB 4200RPM drive as a backup/storage drive...

 

7200 rpm is nice, but it's going to hit your battery and temp of your computer kinda hard though.

 

Not really; my 7K60 always ran a few degrees cooler than my Momentus 5400.2 both at idle & at load; in addition, battery life wasn't affected, probably due to the fact that idle/seek/write consumption for modern drives are very close. In addition, some hardware experts seem to think that faster disk access = less seek with a faster drive = less power consumption.