Vista Experience with faster HDD

Hi there I have the notebook you can see in my signature.. A Tosh P100 with a Centrino Duo, T2400 2GB Ram.. I have just ordered a 250GB 7200rpm HDD to replace the 160GB 5400rpm one in it and am about to pick it up.

As it is, I am running Vista (it came with XP Media Centre) and it runs fine.. But I have noticed that it is not the fastest experience using Vista. (Obviously) Will I notice a good overall performance improvement with the new HDD? Just basic tasks, going through files etc..? It only gives my current 5400rpm drive 4.8...what should I expect with the new one?

Thanks for any comments!

 

WEI is not a very useful benchmark. Run HDTune (free) and post your results here.

The Seagate 7200.3 250GB tops at around 90MB/sec.

 

do not base your performance off of the WEI charts, it is a very bad benchmark.
Your drive experience with the new drive will probably be like 5.5 or something like that.
What really makes the difference is the actual real benchmarks of the drive. Your system drive most likely has a dual platter 160gb drive, meaning that it performs around 35mb/sec(average). The 250gb 7200rpm drive will perform around 62-75mb/sec (average) depending on the manufacturer. The loading times will decrease with the faster drive. It should be a nice upgrade.

you can run hdtune on your current drive, and than on the new drive, and you can compare from their.
You can also run pcmark 05 or pcmark vantage and compare scores between the two drives, for real life performance benchmarks

K-TRON

 

Ok I ran HD Tune and I got an average transfer rate of 37.5Mbps, Access Time is 18.3ms, Burst Rate 80.5 Mbps and CPU Usage is 4.4%..

My current drive is a Fujitsu 160GB 5400rpm..
The one I am going to fit is a Seagate 7200.3 7200rpm 250GB..

How should that compare..??

 

Seagate = 2*(Fujitsu)

 

Here's a Seagate 7200.3 250GB result: http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=24607&d=1222026988

 

benchmarks don't matter. it should be very feelable how much less sluggy the system is. espencially the faster accesstimes help much, too.

I've had 4200rpm disks, 5400rpm disks, and 7200rpm disks. each one is a big step forward. now i have an ssd, laters i'll get the intel ssd. step by step it gets better, more responsive.

your experience about how it feels is the most important thing

 

Yeah I just want to get the best possible performance out of this machine for Vista.. I like the way Vista works.. Dont mind it at all. Some people hate it. And it runs great on my machine..just want to get it better.

Just a side note... I happened to change my RAM to 667Mhz PC5400 RAM as I was upgrading to be upgrading my laptop to 2GB. (It had 533Mhz PC4200)
When I did change, music files started being choppy, video files sluggish and overall the system seemed jumpy with heavy tasks..!
I dont think there was anything wrong with the RAM which was CORSAIR and guaranteed to be compatible.
But I put in 2 GB of 533 PC4200 RAM and it runs much better! I wonder if the differences in the latencies affected the OS to such an extent that it was so noticable..

 

Overall the system was stable.. Booted up fine etc.. Was just as fast as it is now.. But Media playback is much better than it was with the 667Mhz RAM...