Laptop Hard Drive Question

[albertyay]

I have a Toshiba Satellite 1905-s277
1.6 P4
512 SDRAM
30G 4200 rpm HD

I am planning on upgrading the hard drive so that I can edit about an hour of home video at a time. I use Pinnacle Studio 8 and mainly just edit out footage and add a few titles and fades, with a little background music here and there.

I have narrowed my hard drive choices down to the IBM/Hitachi 60G 5400rpm 5K80 or the 40G 7200rpm E7K60.

Do you know of any reason either of these wouldn't work with my laptop?

What is your experience with the 5400 vs 7200 rpm drives? Is the increased performance of the 7200 worth the loss in storage capacity?

Do you have any other suggestion on hard drives other than the ones I listed above?

Thanks.

 

[Frightcrawler]

This is just a case of what you need more.
Are you going to install a lot of space-consuming programs? If so, get the 5k80.
If your just gonna install a small amount of programs, but you want the extra boost in performance, get the E7k60.

BTW, are you aware that the 5k80 can be found in 80 gb versions and the 7k60 has a 60 gb version? Just thought you'd like to know in case you want more space.

 

[ShellGuy]

I would get the 60gb 7200rpm drive.


Will

 

[albertyay]

Thanks for the input!

I think I'll wait on another paycheck and go for the 60gig 7200.

 

[RichieZ]

Originally posted by: albertyay
Thanks for the input!

I think I'll wait on another paycheck and go for the 60gig 7200.

good chocie since the e7k60 is really meant for blade servers, ppl have said it doesn't have the power saving features of the 7k60

 

[firerock]

From my personal notebook experience, faster hd is always be the better choice. Sure, you will lose a bit of space, but that could be worked around, but performance will always be key!

 

[Kaido]

I upgraded my old thinkpad from a slower hard drive (probably 4800 or less lol) to a 20gb 5400rpm hard drive...the 40gb 4800 was nearly the same price but I decided to go for speed...what a difference it made! Definately definately definately wait and get a 7200rpm if you can.

Also, Tom's Hardware did a battery life comparison test between different hard drive speeds and it turns out that a 7200rpm hard drive only cuts battery life by like 5 minutes.

I'm planning on putting a Hitachi Travelstar 7K60 7200rpm 60gb laptop hard drive in my next notebook...it seems to have great reviews all around.

 

[albertyay]

That's great news!

I said to heck with patience and ordered the 60gig from zipzoomfly this morning.

 

[aakerman]

If you're going for the 7K60, I'd get the 5K80 instead... it's almost as fast, because the data density is higher - and it won't get as hot/noisy as the 7200rpm.
Some buyer's have been known to get quiet/cool 7k60 drives, I'm not one of them.

Oh, sorry.. didn't see you'd already bought one Well hope that you get one of the good ones =)

 

[ShellGuy]

oops aaker, always speakin before reading all the way through... LOL... J/k... Let us know how u like the new drive when u get it....

Will

 

[albertyay]

So far I'm realizing a fantastic increase in performance! In addition to switching the hard drive, I changed the XP settings to optimize for performance, and I'm amazed at how much quicker everything is loading and running. I also set up another hardware profile for video editing and turned off many background programs/services using system.msc (I found some info on blackviper.com). I was able to boot up using the alternate hardware profile, but haven't edited any video yet - but I hope to be very pleased.

I took my old 30gig 4200rpm drive and put it in an external case (as someone on this forum had mentioned) and was able to transfer all my data to the new drive after reinstalling XP. There may be an easier way to do it, but it worked well for me. And now I have the extra external storage to boot (no pun intended).

I haven't noticed any increase in noise, but my laptop has a pretty noisy fan anyway so it may be masked. The computer has also always put out a good bit of heat and it may be running a little bit hotter, but no associated problems so far. As for battery life, the battery had lost some of it's life and I haven't time it, but I'm estimating I'm was only getting an hour or so out of it before switching the drive. But I bought the laptop as a desktop replacement that I could move around the house since I have two small children and often have to compute "on the move" at home. So I keep a couple of power adapters strategically placed around the house to use when I need them. Still, once I have anymore extra cash (which will probably be when the kids are out of college) I might invest in a new battery.


Thanks for eveyone's input!

 

[TBP]

batteries usually lose about half of their life after one year. Also, frequently charging a battery is probably not a good idea. I usually keep my laptop on external power (it will not charge thebattery if the power is >95%). When unplugged, I let it run down to <10% and recharge it to full.