New HD 5400 versus 7200 RPM

Hi, I have few as I am going to buy a new HD very soon( It,s first time to buy a HD for me).

1- My laptop Toshiba M 70 has a 40 GB 5400 RPM SATA HD. If I change it to a 7200 HD of bigger capacity, am I going to get any significant rms of speed on my system( XP Home). How much I will loose from battery life and laptop cooling.

2- I am going to buy an external USB2 HD (self-powered),

Toshiba 120 GB, 5400 RPM, 2 Inch

I want to ask if I get an external drive with 7200 RPM, will it benefit me significatly in terms of speed of data transfer9 as comapred to 5400 one)/

Also are there two interface,SATA and IDE just,like internal ones. If so will SATA be significantly faster?

Thanks for your help.

 

Your laptop will be faster with a 7200 rpm drive.
You will notice a slight loss of battery, a little louder drive, but not much extra heat.
For an external drive, it is 7200 rpm you might need to use 2 usb ports to power it, and it wont be much faster.
IDE and SATA external drives wont be much of a difference in speed for those drives.

 

That may not be true. Depending on the models, a current generation 7200 rpm drive make no noticeable difference battery life or noise.

 

Thanks nizzy!

Will it be noticeable or significant practically? What,s ur experience/ opinion?

I was just going to buy 5400 rpm drive( readily available) when somehow the speed issue came in my mind and now I can,t decide which one will be a good option( 7200 seems even difficul to be found easily here in the market).

I will use it mainly for my system image backups and data storage.

Are you sure about it? Never read of it BTW.

 

Any more advice please?

 

Go with the 7200 rpm drive, noise, battery life and heat are pretty much the same as 5400 drives now.

 

Thanks KinightUnit!