T43, Thinkpad Protection, 5400 vs.7200 rpm ?

I ordered T43 2668A1U, a manager's pick, several days ago, but I am still under due consideration for two things.

1. Has anyone experienced "Thinkpad Protection Service"?

2. HDD 60GB 5400 rpm vs. 7200 rpm, Is it worth to pay more to get 7200 rpm?

I guess I can have my T43 soon (Est. Ship date is 11/30) unless I don't change anything further on my current order.
I will get back to you guys with my short review once I have it.
Thanks,
Max.

:buyIBM:

 

On the HDD issue, the 7200 RPM drive is very nice, but I don't know if it's worth it for you. What's the cost and what will you be doing with the machine?

 

It's important to remember that *THE* bottleneck in computers today is the hard drive.
I personally can tell the difference in performance between a 5400, 7200, 10000, and 15000 on a desktop machine.
But I haven't tested that on laptops (I would presume they're similar enough)

 

hard drives will likely be the bottleneck in computers for a long time to come, any time you've got a mechanical device having to physically move and read data (which is what a hard drive head is doing when it moves over a disk) it can't possibly be as fast as a processor or memory where the job is to process 0s and 1s as fast as possible. Having more memory (RAM) will somewhat offset a slower hard drive though, once an application is in memory and loaded there's no need to hit the hard drive again (except for opening a new file etc.) and if you have say 1GB of RAM then several application instructions can just be stored in the much faster and more accessible RAM. So, 7200RPM is nice to have, but if the cost is much more then just making sure you have 1GB of RAM will go a long way as well.

 

The RAM of my T43 will be totaled 1GB with free 512MB offered by levono.
The price difference between 60Gb 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm is $50.
Mostly, my T43 is going to be used for school works, not for any games.

Besides, is it quite necessary to get "Protection Service" for Thinkpad?

Max.

:buyIBM:

 

Can't wait for those flash based hard drives to come along.

 

Gigabyte released a PCI-based one for desktops, but it gets expensive quick. 4GB is the max, which will be expensive and the performance gain was comparable to a nice 15k HDD.

I don't know if I would ever trust volatile storage in a laptop

 

Samsung was supposed to be coming out with a notebook one. I think it was 16GB and $1k. Haven't heard about it lately.

 

Still, I can't imagine you'd get and reasonable cas latency in sticks of that density.

 

Pay the $50 for the 7200rpm drive. If it was $100 I would stick with the 5400rpm drive.