Laptop Hard Drive Choice: Speed vs. Size

Purchasing a Dell e1405, primarily for MS-Office use, web browse, e-mail and occasional, future light media and game use. I like a fast/"light" laptop though am watching my budget. Is it preferable to select the 60 GB 7200RPM drive rather than the 80 GB size for my use? I feel if I really need more space in the future I can get an external. I'd rather spend the few extra dollars on the faster processor and other accessories. Thoughts, advice, please...

 

5400 RPM should suffice. I assume the 80GB is that speed.

Considering what you do. Space would be more important. Very little performance will you notice.

 

Thanks...by the way, I planned to select the standard screen, rather than Truelife, as viewing of movies/games would likely be done .on a TV or larger LCD screen. I am concerned with glare given my use. Would you agree? It seems all manufacturers are moving to glossy screens, so am a bit afraid of buying old technology.

 

I never liked Glossy screens that much. It was not a must have. Screen brightness and contrast were most important and that is why I am so happy with the D620 with the NVIDIA since I can adjust all parameters : color, tint, contrast, brightness, etc.

 

I personally like desktop like performance so I would choose speed over space. I have only about 20GBs on my drive anyway. You'll see a bigger perfromance boost from the drive since most most people never push their CPU to the limit.

 

For what you'll do there is no big difference, if any. Go for a size.

 

In actual use, where would the larger or faster drive improvement be seen? Whhich one and how? I'm new to this styff so appreciate the education.

 

It depends on what you are doing with your notebook. If you are dealing with video editing go with larger space as well high speed RPM. But for gaming you need size than speed. 5400rpm would be enough for gaming. For realtime video capturing using handycam(via Firewire) you should pay attention to RPM speed

 

However, as a note, for video capture, CPU and RAM is also very important, using my Acer 8200 (only 5400 rpm hard drive) I can capture video much better than I ever could using my old Toshiba (7200rpm hard drive, but Pentium 4 with only 1GB of Ram)

 

All other things being equal, you'll notice a large difference in speed using the 7200rpm versus 5400rpm mainly when working with very large files. If your computer doesn't have enough ram available to accomplish the task at hand, it resorts to using the hard drive. This is where hd speed really comes into play. If you have enough RAM, and aren't doing much video editing or intensive high-res photo work, you probably won't notice too much difference. So for you I'd recommend the 5400.

 

Hard drive speed is only noticeable when accessing the hard drive... such as booting Windows, loading a program, or opening (or saving) very large files. For most people, time spent accessing the hard drive ( opening programs and files) is a VERY small percentage of total computer use, so hard drive speed is not very important. Usually people are surfing the internet, listening to music, or typing into office programs, none of which are affected by hard drive speed after the initial opening of the respective programs.

Note that "opening a program" refers to loading data from the hard drive into RAM. RAM offers a processor access to data MUCH faster (many orders of magnitude faster) than the hard drive does, and that's the only reason RAM is even used in computers. Once the data is loaded into RAM, the processor accesses it from RAM instead of from the hard drive. That is why hard drive speed only affects the "opening" speed of programs, but not the actual running speed of programs. You may wonder why hard drives are used at all if RAM is so much faster... well first, data in RAM disappears when the power is turned off (hard drives are more permanent, or "non-volatile), and second, 1GB of RAM costs about 200 times as much as 1GB of hard drive.

One exception to what I just said occurs when you have more programs and files "open" (loaded into RAM) than your RAM can actually hold (like someone already mentioned). In that case, the processor has to start using the hard drive to access the data that can't fit into RAM, which seriously slows performance. This only happens when you have too many programs open or just not enough memory. With 512MB of RAM you can open a lot of usual programs before this so-called "swapping" happens. With only 256MB of RAM in Windows XP, you're just about guaranteed to run into this problem after opening only a few programs. With 1GB of RAM or more, the only time this could happen is when running giant programs (like newer 3D games) or accessing giant files (like complex video editing), but for all intents and purposes, it would still be very infrequent.


Some programs require loading or saving of very large files (like Half Life 2, which frequently stops to load gigantic new 3D levels). Using programs like this that access the hard drive a lot will be more affected by hard drive speed than regular programs like internet browers and office programs.

I desire speed as much as the next person, but realistically I know that waiting an extra 2 seconds to load my email program on a slower hard drive is worth it for the dramatic price savings. A 7200 rpm hard drive in a notebook always costs a LOT more than slower options of the same capacity (as much as $300 different for the largest sizes). So much more that I personally don't think it's worth the cost, at all. Now if you're already going to buy the top of the line product anyway and don't care about the price, of course you will want to buy the fastest drive available.


One thing I should note... in desktop systems the price difference between slow and fast hard drives is so minimal that you should always choose the faster drive. Only in notebooks does a slower hard drive save enough money to be a better choice.