Do I need 5400 or 7200rpm?

As much as I would prefer 7200, it seems my laptop choices are more limited that way, since most manufacturers still go with 5400, though I don't know why. My old notebook had 5400. I didn't notice it being really slow, but I did notice choppiness when playing audio files. Any advice?

 

5,400RPM will be fine. The fact that you experienced choppiness while playing audio files was probably due to a different factor.

 

5400 will be allright but just make sure you stay away from seagate drives... they seem to fail a lot... Western Digital and Hitachi ones are the best..

 

I'd go with 7200 for perormance issues. But 5400 if you're using it just for storage. Not really gonna notice too much of a difference. Maybe when viewing pics or accessing/moving large files. The 7200 would be faster, but I use 5400 for my backups.

 

My advice is to get the cheapest option the manufacturer's offer (you're configuring a new one, correct?) and then get either:

Scorpio Blue 500GB 5400 RPM drive that performs better (real-world) than the 7200.4 Seagates, or...

Hitachi 500GB 7K500 7200 RPM drive that I've just ordered for simply more speed than the Blue offers.

When you're satisfied with your install/new drive - sell the original or keep it as a backup to sell when you also sell the notebook for a newer one.

 

The industry's dirty secret is the average consumer knows nothing about drives and has a tendency to focus on size. Manufacturers can keep the overall price down to latch consumers.

 

In a nutshell, it basically comes down to this:

1) If you want longer battery life and higher capacities (up to 1TB), go with a 5,400RPM hard drive, although be warned that HDD performance will be slightly less than that of 7,200RPM hard drives.

2) If you want performance, go with a 7,200RPM hard drive. However, this comes at the cost of lower capacities (up to 500GB) and less than spectacular battery life.

Personally, the benefits of 5,400RPM hard drives far outweigh the slight decrease in performance of 7,200RPM hard drives. So your boot time takes a couple of seconds more and you have to wait a few seconds extra for your map to load in a game. I place HDD capacity far above a slight performance increase of a higher spindle speed hard drive when it comes to notebooks.

With that said, I just picked up a Western Digital (is there any other brand to buy?) 640GB 5,400RPM hard drive. Regardless of any hard drive you buy, ensure that it will fit in your bay. Typically, the higher capacity hard drive you buy post-640GB, the thicker the hard drive will be.

For example, the biggest WD hard drive I could buy at 5,400RPM that would still fit in my laptop was 9.5mm thick. Past 640GB, you're looking at a 12.5mm thick hard drive, which some laptops are not able to fit in their HDD bay.

 

If you need capacity, you need it period - but you are getting a slower drive for negligible battery increasing properties.

The new Hitachi 7K500 posts lower power specs than the Scorpio Blue I'm using now... .69 idle W's and 1.8 read/write W's vs. .85 W's and 2.5 read/write W's for the Scorpio Blue.

Interesting, huh?