drive speeds 4200/5400/7200

Which is better suited for what and why?

 

Pretty easy: the higher the better!

 

How big is the difference going to be?

I was looking at a S2110 at Portable One, where the base hard drive is 40GB 4200RPM. Disk space is not a concern, I'm more worried about speed. Well, upgrading to a 60GB 5400RPM would be $180, or $200 to go to a 60GB 7200RPM. I mean, **** thats a lot of money for that upgrade.

Yes, I know you can buy it off newegg but then you void the warranty and have to keep the other one around and keep switching and yadda yadda, just sounds like a hassle.

 

It is completely doable, but Fujitsu is picky about user upgrades. I would suggest hanging onto the old drive in case you have to send it in for service.

 

Yes, what zazonz said. You can upgrade the hard drive yourself. I would get an aftermarket drive from newegg.com or zipzoomfly and install it yourself. I think their 100GB 5400 rpm hard drives are around $150. Personally 5400 rpm drives are fast enough for me, it was a nice step up from a 4200 which took quite a while to load. If you get a large 80-100 gb 5400 drive then due to the density of the the discs it will give you near 7200 rpm performance. Be sure that your notebook is capable of supporting whatever size hard you get though.

Matt

 

I would say stick with the 5400RPM for your notebook, unless you want a warmer palmrest.

Of course this all depends on the person using the laptop and some may find the level of heat just fine while others may not if you're going with the 7200rpm harddrive.

Also you will experience a slight drop in battery life since it spins at a higher rate.

5400rpm is just fine for me, not a huge difference from my desktop's 7200rpm Western Digital Caviar harddrive.

Cheers,
Mike

 

Basically the 4200 RPM drive is the slowest out there on the market - only for basic games/photoshop and general productivity. A 5400 RPM drive should give you about a 20-25 percent boost in performance and would be better suited for games, photoshop and some light video editing. 7200 RPM drives are currently the fastest out on the market - they offer a 15-20 percent performance gain over the 5400 RPM drives and are best suited for gamers and video editors on the go.

 

It also depends on the size of your notebook. 7200 RPM drives are better suited for larger notebooks because there's more space in which the heat can be dissipated.

 

Not really - heat dissipation shouldn't be too much of a problem, especially in higher quality HDs. I've seen 7200 RPM drives installed in 12" notebooks. The only price you pay for a higher RPM drive is a small battery drain.

 

Photoshop makes extensive use of the HD as a scratch disc, so the faster a drive you can give it the better. Also, performance will be improved if the scratch disc is not the HD that Photoshop is installed on.