Hard Drive

[Zatara214]

As you can see in my sig, I went with a 5400 rpm drive. I did it because a lot of people seemed to have heat issues with the 7200 rpm drives, and because I had never had heat issues before, and I didn't want a notebook cooler since I'm never home with it, I didn't know how to deal with it.

However, after doing a little research, I'm starting to regret getting the 5400 rpm. It would seem that there is a significant performance boost to be had in upgrading, with very little heat increase (and the heat is bad as it is now, so I suppose adding to it really won't make that much of a difference at this point anyway)

And so I'll just ask, is it worth me spending $100 on newegg to get a 7200 rpm drive at this point? Should I get a 320 GB, or wait for the 500 GB models? If so, should I go with WD, Seagate, or Hitachi?

On a side note, I was looking at the SSD drives on newegg, and I swear it's a circus in the review section. Nothing but angry customers complaining about the false advertisement of the write speed (which is true, the write speed is AWFUL on the MLC drives), and manufacturers denying that there is anything wrong with the drives (read the reviews, it's good for some entertainment lol)

So I'm holding off on SSD drives until maybe next year or so, maybe even longer, since as you can tell, I do value capacity over speed.

So wadaya think?

[Anewbus]

It sort of depends on the size of the drive. You won't see huge performance boosts on say a 320GB HD between 5400rpm and 7200rpm. This is due to the design of the drive. Example: a 320GB 5400rpm drive is more efficient and faster than a 200GB 7200rpm drive.
The thing that is also effected is your battery. A 7200rpm drive will have greater battery drain because more power is required.
The heat increase between a 5400rpm and a 7200rpm is minimal and not a huge concern.

If you already got a large HDD 320GB and up at 5400rpm, you would be wasting money upgrading it to 7200rpm when you take into account diminished returns in other areas.
However, you got a small HDD 160GB - 200GB at 5400rpm or something then it "might" be worth upgrading, but I would go with a larger drive at 5400rpm rather than a 7200rpm if battery life is a concern. If not, then it might be worth getting a small HDD at 7200rpm.

[Zatara214]

Well battery life isn't a concern at all, since it's already at 1:30 or so, I wouldn't use this on a plane or anything to game. Then again, I could lol... anyway, I did get a 320 GB at 5400 rpm, and so I guess it really wouldn't cut it for the upgrade then, huh. Ok, thanks for the info.

[Anewbus]

Well battery life isn't a concern at all, since it's already at 1:30 or so, I wouldn't use this on a plane or anything to game. Then again, I could lol... anyway, I did get a 320 GB at 5400 rpm, and so I guess it really wouldn't cut it for the upgrade then, huh. Ok, thanks for the info.

I would say your correct considering you also have the super hi-res screen going which also digs into batt life. Even though batt life is not a concern to you, you wouldn't want to config in such a way as to limit it down to 30 to 45 minutes. The three biggest things that effect batt life on a lappy are:
1)Screen size and native resolution
2)GPU
3)Hard drive
That's why things like 25MHz CPUs are good.:) Not huge, but it helps.