2 Harddrive questions

[laptopnewbie]

Is there a big difference between 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM?

Also, is there a noise difference? I read somewhere that a 7200 will make more noise but I couldn't find anyone else talking about that

[The Bill]

7200 rpms - 5400 rpms = 1800 rpms = 25% of 7200 rpms

It's just basically how fast a hard drive runs, i.e. how fast it can transfer etc. It won't increase boot times, or any such activity's like that. But if your doing alot of reading and writing to the drive, you'd probably want a 7,200. I read in another post that you were using MatLab, in that case it might be better to use a 7,200RPM HD over a 5,400.

As for the noise, I have personally never heard of any problems with noise from a 7,200 =/

[Anewbus]

There is also heat and battery power to consider along with file transfer. 7200rpm drives are faster than 5400rpm, but actually up to a certain size.

A 5400rpm drive can produce less heat and uses less battery power. In some cases it can be better to go with a 7200rpm HD. Say you wanted a 80GB or 100GB HD, you could get away with a 7200rpm without too much additional heat or drain on battery even with moderate file transfer activity like gaming. However, if you wanted a 160GB HD at 7200rpm, you would actually be better off with a 320GB at 5400rpm. The 320GB would actually be faster then the 160GB 7200rpm HD due to design especially in file transfer rate. The 160GB 7200 would actually have slower file transfer rates and heat up more not to mention drain your battery faster, up to an hour difference depending. The 320GB 5400 would run cooler and more effciently. If your just doing email, spreadsheets, word processing or just web surfing, you need not worry too much. However, if your going to be doing any gaming or sound processing or video processing, etc. your going to have heavy file transfer activity and that is what you want to consider.

This is something I learned from Justin when I ordered my lappy.