HD rpm speed

[girtha1134]

I was given a Acer Aspire one AOD250, it presently has a 160 gig 5400 rpm sata hard drive

its got 2 gig of ddr2@667

and running windows xp

would there be a noticeable change if i upgraded it to a 7200 rpm drive

 

[fb39ca4]

Yes, 7200 rpm drives are faster so your system should feel more responsive when you upgrade.

 

[wurkfur]

I added a OCZ Vertex 2 to a laptop (160 MB/s Real World). It was a night an day difference. Prior to that I had a 7200 rpm drive that I put in as an upgrade from a 4500 rpm low power drive. The 7200 rpm drive was a noticable difference but didn't rock my world. The 120 GB Vertex made the laptop come alive. At that point my CPU became the bottle neck and not the rest of the system waiting for the hard drive.

I got more done between charges because I didn't have to wait as long for stuff to load or save.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

would there be a noticeable change if i upgraded it to a 7200 rpm drive

yes there would be a definite performance difference between 7200 and 5400rpm drives.
the 7200 rpm will be tangibly faster meaning you can actually 'feel' the speed, rather than just performing better in benchmarks.
if the price is similar, get a 7200rpm drive.

 

[Pyree]

At 160GB, even if you upgrade to newer HDD with higher platter density with the same rpm, you will still see performance increase let alone a higher platter density HDD with higher rpm. But of course an SSD is fast in another level, but I think you better not take that upgrade path as your laptop is quite old.

 

[pjmelect]

Although the faster hard disk will make the computer faster, I don't think that you will notice much difference in general usage. It may not be worth upgrading just for the speed increase unless you also want the increased storage capacity. Don't forget that a 2T byte drive will be over twice the speed of a 160 Gig drive at the same spindle speed.

 

[Pinhedd]

You will definitely see a performance increase by going from 5400 - 7200 RPM. However if I may make the recommendation, get a Seagate Momentus XT. They're 7200 RPM hybrid hard drives which contain a 4GiB SSD that acts as a massive read buffer, it caches the most commonly read sectors so everything will be more responsive. They're not all that much more expensive and IMO are a must have for any laptop

 

[girtha1134]

Yes, 7200 rpm drives are faster so your system should feel more responsive when you upgrade.

Thanks