I need to find an affordable hard drive. Ayudame por favor!

I would say my budget is $50ish. I'm looking for speed here, since I have a second hard drive already for storage (if I'll even need it). I was thinking of buying a really small SSD (8/16GB) and just throw on there what I consistently use, but didn't think that was a good idea. I think I'll go for a speedy 7200rpm HDD. These are a couple I've been looking at.

Newegg.com - Recertified: Western Digital WD5000BEKT/R 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -
Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKX 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Newegg.com - HITACHI Travelstar 7K500 0A72332 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Opinions and suggestions are welcome.

And what does it mean by bare drive? Will I have to buy a cable or case for it to use it?

(Going towards a dv6t quad)

 

Well just to let you know that second link is a desktop 3.5" SATA drive. I would avoid refurbished drives like the plague, just hurts my brain thinking about buying one. I'm assuming you area looking for an internal notebook SATA drive?

Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9320423AS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

This is going to be your best deal for a 7200 rpm drive. Honestly if you are just using your laptop for normal tasks, a 7200 rpm and 5400 rpm drive there will be no difference. The boot time will be the same, faster read/write speeds.

 

I agree about refurbished drives. But how will you not see a difference between 7200rpm and 5400rpm? There is definitely a noticeable difference between the two.

 

In terms of responsiveness? I have 2 Z61t's same CTO, same stock Lenovo image with recovery discs, the only difference is one has a 640 GB 5400 rpm Seagate MomentusLP drive the other has a 750 GB Scorpio Black 7200 rpm drive. There is no noticeable difference in boot times, responsiveness is the same.

Sure read/write speeds, there is a difference but for the average user who just browses the web or does basic tasks, there will hardly be a difference. Maybe a MomentusXT drive but I've owned 2 and both are disappointingly slow. When I think of a "fast" drive I personally look for system responsiveness and boot times. Then it won't matter for a modern 5400 vs 7200 rpm drive.

 

If you do a boottimer test, you'd probably cut 30% off startup time. I've used numerous 5400rpm and 7200rpm hdd's over the years and on boot up I could tell you instantly what speed the drive is. 7200rpm drives by nature have 33% faster response times because of their faster spindle speeds which also helps with sequential transfers, and typically have much larger caches too. If you poll these and many other forums you will see users notice an improvement by going from 5400rpm to 7200rpm. I just feel your statement is inaccurate and misleading.

Your experience of the XT being disappointing slow is also contrary to most users, including myself, that have seen significant improvements using that drive.

I wouldn't even consider a 5400rpm hdd unless you're in something like a netbook where the CPU is your biggest bottleneck anyhow, and also don't want the added heat and vibration of a 7200rpm drive.

Of course there are other factors involved like number of platters, and how the data is distributed on the hard drive, but that takes some understanding of how to partition and defrag your hard drive.