which of these 2 is a better hard drive?

for my asus C90, which hard drive would perform better for gaming? 160GB 5400rpm, or 120GB 7200?

 

A faster HDD for gaming will only decrease your load times (your games will load up faster). You won't see a difference in game.
If you want to improve your gaming performance you should invest in more RAM.

 

If the price is the same and you don't need that extra 40GB of space, I'd certainly go with the 7200.

 

The better would be the 7200, but less space

 

Id go for the larger drive for sure, remember the larger the drive is the more data dense it is. So performance goes up.

a 250gb 5400rpm is about equal to a 160gb 7200rpm in read speed, a 120gb 7200rm is probably close to a 200gb 5400rpm disk.

Access time will be abit slower and write will be abit slower but read is on par.

Now when you factor in the cost per GB, and the idea that more space is always a good thing (a single game can eat up over 10gb of space, not to mention multimedia like video files and mp3's) I think its a no-brainer to always go for the largest 5400rpm drive you can find.

I personally use the 250gb Western Digital Scorpio which can be found as cheap as 180$

Other benefits include: less heat generated and possibly even less battery power used.

Gaming is honestly not a good reason to seek a faster drive, people that read/write files constantly like video editing and such are those who may really gain enough to compensate for all the pros the 5400 has that I listed above.

 

what about RAM? would increasing ram from 2 to 4GB be worth $110 that it would cost? i want to play WoW and Crysis, but is upgrading the Ram noticeably beneficial?

 

If you upgrade ram, it will improve your gaming, but i dunno how much.

 

If there's an option, upgrading your Graphics Card would be the best bet to get a better performance for Gaming......

 

Upgrading from 2 to 4 GB will not help at all.

A faster hard drive will load games faster, but most games have very short load times anyways, so you won't notice too much of a difference. Remember that faster drives also drain more battery on a mobile machine.

 

What OS are you using? If you're using Windows XP or a 32 bit OS, you won't be able to use the full 4GB of RAM (the maximum you can get is about 3.2-3.5GB).
Increasing your RAM would give you an increase in performance, but right now 2GB should be enough for most games out there. If you do plan to upgrade your RAM, buy it from another company (newegg, ncix, etc) and install it yourself. It will be cheaper that way.

Like prashanthm said, the best upgrade you can make is a GPU upgrade. That will help you the most for gaming and remember that 99% of GPUs cannot be upgraded once you have your notebook. So what you buy is what you're stuck with until you buy a new notebook.

So if you really want to improve your gaming performance, upgrading your GPU will make the most difference. Upgrading your RAM comes in second, and the HDD will only improve your load times.

 

I personally think 7200rpm really shines in games which often have loading screens (e.g. Oblivion and the Witcher). Considering how slow my old laptop was at performing mundane maintenance tasks I don't regret getting 7200rpm for my laptop, faster Vista start time (marginal but still) is another plus.

 

remember to have the latest video drivers installed, really put that expensive p.o.s. video card to work.