Vaoi SZ6 with 7200RPM HD

A lot of retailers are trashing the garbage 4200 or 5400rpm drives that come with the SZ6xx models, and replacing with 200GB, 7200RPM drives.

How will these faster drives impact battery life? Has anyone tested this.. .or performance gain with the 7200rpm? I would be swapping the 160 GB-hydrid (5400rpm) for the 7200 - advisable??

 

I have not read nor done it before, but obviously it will affect the battery life, and will exhibit some sort of performance gain with it. There should be no problem if you want to switch to the 7200rpm drive, other than maybe in the long run, the extra heat might make your machine ' grow old' faster. When the engineers design the laptop, I'm sure there's a reason why they chose the lower speed drives. But nevertheless, you'll probably replaced the machine 5 years from now anyway, so that probably won't hurt you much.

As for short term problems, I don't think there will be a problem for a machine that is not so compact like the sz. I might be wrong though.

 

Trashing? You mean they are no good?

I know the 4200rpm are slow, but there's nothing wrong with the 5400 rpm afaik.

If you want to see top performing harddrive check out this:
http://www.chip.de/perl/tpdb/tpdb_out.pl (select Festplatten Notebook)

The top 10 results are all 5400 rpm.

Different magazine: http://bestenliste.pc-professionell.eu/Bestenliste.aspx?Id=38

I was under the impression that I wanted a 7200 RPM disk for my Asus notebook. After seeing these results i will just get a 5400 rpm Samsung.

 

Faster HDDs mean your laptop will heat up faster and use more battery life, but you will see the difference in performance. For me I dont notice too much of a lag with the 4200RPM HDD in my FZ, except for when I copy large amounts of data, like over 2-3GB, at a time.

Also consider the size. Arent the SZ models the 13 inch laptops? I would imagine that a 7200RPM HDD in that would heat up the laptop really fast then. 5400RPM is not slow at all, its actually the standard speed in HDDs. 7200RPM is considered an upgrade.

 

This dogma turns out to be not true if the above tests are right.

 

It may be true, but people do not think about it in the right context.

With a slow drive, you may be using less power, but it takes longer to complete and operation. Basically, you are using less power over a longer period.

With a faster drive, you may be using more power, but it takes less time to complete and operation. So, you are using more power over a shorter period.

The power usage differences are not even that significant.

Unless you are going to be running your HDD at maximum capacity the whole time that you are using battery power, it really does not make a huge real-world difference.

 

Sony's offering 7200rpm drives straight from them now.

 

I didn't read the review posted at the top of this thread but I read other reviews before I installed the Hitachi 7200rpm 200gb drive in my SZ. It is faster and I don't notice any battery life hit. After 1 month of running with this drive I would give it the thumbs up, very quite and does not run hot. I put a T7600 processor (2.33mhz) and my battery life with both the hard drive and new cpu are the same. I think that battery life isn't affected because Vista manages resources way better than XP. I haven't seen my CPU load at 100% often. I am using a 4gb readyboost drive and 2gigs of ram so maybe the hard drive doesn't have to work as hard. With all the improvements I still get over three hours on a standard battery with wireless, bluetooth, video on highest settings etc..

 

What reviews? Do you have links?

I'd like to read.

 

Back in the days when i was trying to get the most amount of battery life out of my hp laptop I actually ran some test with a 5400 rpm samsung drive and a 7200 rpm hitachi. The laptop did get considerably more warm, and the battery lasted about 5-15 minutes less. The speed increase was actually a bit noticeble for things like photoshop, but for the rest it was the same. It was a 6lb btw.

I would say unless you have a Desktop replacement laptop ( like 5lbs+) I would say don't get anything besides a 5400 rpm drive ( its the best speed/heat compromise).

That being said I bought a sz490 laptop that had a 4200 rpm hd and it was definately too slow. I had an extra 120gb 7200 drive lying around (perks of being a tech) and its what im currently running. Its not the best scenario but it gets the job done