Should I wait for 7200 hdd?

Lenovo hasn't been offering 7200 rpp drives for anything but the 100gb for a few weeks now. I want a 60gb drive because on my last 2 computers, I've never used more than 20gb. So 100gb seems wasteful. I called Lenovo and asked about the 7200. Guy said stock is likely low, that's why it's not offered. He said when stock is replensihed, it will be offered again. That was a couple weeks ago. But it's still not offered.

I'm eager to buy as I'll be moving in a month and wanted to finalize purchases. What should I do, hold out for the faster hdd?

 

You won't find them in that size anyways even from most online parts dealers. The 7200rpm drives are the "high end" to begin with, so they are going to be the largest size possible.

 

Lenovo was offering them in May and early June.

 

Guys, do me a favor. Take a look at this performance comparison between an R60 and a T60.

http://reviews.cnet.com/Lenovo_ThinkPad_R60/4505-3121_7-31879280-2.html?tag=sub

The systems are identical except for 5400/7200 hard drive speed (the R60 has 7200 and the T60 has 5400). Notice how the 7200 gained only 1 point over the 5400? Doesn't appear like that much of a performance gain. Anybody have any comments?

 

It really depends on what you are doing. Web or Office won't see much of a performance boost. I thought NewEgg was selling the 60GB SATA drive a while back. Perhaps they are in short supply.

 

ZaZ, what tasks/uses really benefit from having a 7200 drive?

 

Consider what needs to happen to accomplish a certain task and that will help you form a good hypothesis of performance. Here's some examples:

1. Recent games - textures must be loaded and they tend to be flushed out of the sytem when not in use, then reloaded later. This causes high volume of disk i/o. In addition, large maps, whether buffered fully or dynamically loaded, require disk i/o while playing.

2. Video Watching - If you are watching a DVD, your harddrive has nothing to do. So hardly any disk i/o occurs. However, what about a home movie you are editing? Well the entire time you are editing, you are reading frames from disk, and rewriting them. So high disk i/o volume.

3. Internet - load pictures/pages from the internet into memory, never has to touch your harddrive.

4. Word Processing - buffers the document into memory, only writes out during auto-saving and dictionary lookups etc.

Please note, on overburdened systems (heavy multitasking or very complicated programs), you may run into virtual memory issues that make things that are in physical memory get written to disk so that the physical memory can retrieve data that was previously put into virtual memory.

I'd read the thread too, they get into more detail about the differences, but rule of thumb (no knowledge of make of drive or amount/type of data) is 7200 is noticably faster than 5400 of the same bus type (SATA vs IDE).

 

You can't use synthetic benchmarks as real performance indicators.

 

You are right; stock is very low. For some reason Hitachi HDD, which IBM sell, are having major supply issues with the 7200 drives. I have tried to hunt down the drives in computer stores in Toronto, Canada and most of them have said the drives have been on backorder for over a month. So don't expect them to be available anytime soon.

 

Audio/Video encoding or anything where there is a lot of reading or writing to the drive will benefit the most. In addition faster boot times applications will hang less when clicking on them.