Laptop Hard Drive Replacement

[log1kq2]

So I've been thinking of replacing my hard drive on my ancient Toshiba Satellite P25-S609. It currently has a 5400rpm 80gig drive ATA-5(way too slow). Any recommendations on which 7200rpm drive I should go with?

 

[DonInKansas]

I've got a Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm in mine that is lightyears ahead of the 5400 it replaced.

 

[elconejito]

I went with a WD 160GB 5400rpm on my old Dell 8600 (ATA-6) to replace a dying 80GB. It's a little quicker, but nothing to write home about. The rest of the system is just too slow to take advantage of any speed increase. It was only about $15 more than an 80GB ($70 vs $55).

I don't think I saw any 7200rpm ATA drives, but I could be mistaken. The biggest reason i think to change would be the increase in storage space or, as in my case, to replace a dying drive.

 

[LtGoonRush]

It's not worth replacing the drive. Since the laptop uses the old ATA-5 interface, it won't be able to support modern, fast SATA drives, so the potential performance increase is pretty limited. More importantly, from a quick Googling that laptop is using a Pentium 4 processor, so the harddrive is hardly your bottleneck. Max out the RAM in the system, check to see if the HDD is failing by checking the SMART logs with Crystal Disk Info (look at the "Health Status" indicator), and if it looks good, optimize the drive with MyDefrag.

Really though, you can pick up a brand new Asus laptop for under $500 with a Pentium Dual-core, 4GB of RAM, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. Just make sure to avoid anything with an AMD processor and you'll do fine. The weight, heat, and battery life difference will be amazing, in addition to the performance difference. (Note that if you're interested in playing games you should get a laptop with a videocard).

 

[Old Hippie]

I always upgraded to the faster drives and they do make a difference but you're gonna have a problem finding many 7200rpm IDE drives.

I can't even find any at NewEgg and that's a bad sign.

 

[tcsenter]

Just a doubling of areal density on a new platter can make it worth the upgrade, since we all know (except for someone here) that media to interface (sequential reads/writes) is far more important than interface bandwidth. That 80GB is pretty old. I'm betting the new platters have double the areal density, or better. Try to find one that uses a single platter.