Help with a new notebook harddrive.

Hey folks,

Wanted to get some opinions as to what I should get. The choice is between a 80gig 7200 hd or a 100gig 5400 hd[im looking at staying less than $200]. The replacement hd will be for a thinkpad r40 2.2ghz 768ram 32mb vid card. As you can see, I dont play games with it, but i do tons of photo work.. this spans from just editing the photos to rendering slide shows with videos. I read somewhere that a slow hd can cause skipping in a final slideshow.. I have seen much skipping in the past, but I have never tested this theory with a faster drive. Any thoughts to that logic? Anyhow would this speed difference be something I can notice? or is it better to get the additional space. Also.... my install of xp is on a hidden partition is there someway I can get this off of my present hd and place it on the new one so I can do the standard ibm factory restore? I would like to just hook the new drive up as an external, partition and pass that hidden information over to the new drive then do the r&r and go about my merry way.. is this possible?

Thanks
FB

 

Hey, I have a 5400 in my Toshiba M60 now, and while it is noticably faster than the 4200 in my last Toshiba, I would personally go with the 7200 rpm drive. I would personally go with the Hitachi Travelstar 7200 drive, they have them at newegg.com for a good price, and cheap shipping, and I haven't heard anything negative about this drive. The hard drive is the bottleneck on almost every system out there, so you would be better off with the 80 gig 7200 rpm, unless you absolutely need the extra 20 gig. Also Hitachi's 7200 rpm 100 gig drives are coming down in price, they were just above the $200 mark last I knew, so you might just want to stick in the extra money and get the best of both worlds. They were about $228 plus shipping on newegg last time I checked. A guy on newegg.com said he did this and I think it would work good for you.

Installation could not have been easier. I installed the Hitachi in a USB enclosure and cloned my original drive using Acronis True Image 9.0 (free trial version available at their web site). Then I just installed the drive into my notebook. The cloning took about 3 hours; the installation took five minutes.

So hopefully you this will help you out.

Matt

 

I gotta agree w/jenson04, get a 7200rpm...it will save you from any possible performance problems. As for the drive the travelstar's are pretty good drives, I would personally take speed over size on a laptop and then if I need a lot of space get an external 400+gig firewire hd to dump stuff off onto.

 

The 7200 will give you desktop like performance.

 

Roger that guys ... thanks for the advice! 7200 it is!

FB

 

Try Zipzoomfly.com, their final price is often better than Newegg, and they ship quick too for me!