Laptop hard-drive

[downhiller80]

My Insprion 4000 (P3-800) is struggling a bit. The harddisk is pretty noisy, and I judge that it's the main bottleneck of the system. Have 256MB of memory, plan to buy another 256MB and upgrade the hard disk.

The hard disk in at the moment is an IBM 10GB 4200rpm model. What's the fastest drive I can buy and would you deem it worth it? I don't really need big capacity on this laptop, but will go big if it means faster.

Opinions?

cheers

 

[Dahak]

most laptop drive operate at the 4200rpm spin speed, partly to help cut down on battery consumption but hitachi global storage technology/ibm do have models that run at 5400rpm in a 20-80gb range, or seagate has some 5400rpm drives as well for a 20-40gb range

 

[aceO07]

That's the same laptop I have. I upgraded to a 5400rpm 40gb hitachi. It seems much faster. I couldn't upgrade the 256MB ram since it was 2 sticks of 128MB. I don't want to have extra 128MB stick of ram laying around.

 

[vegetation]

Ugh that's a really slow and noisy drive, I had the exact same model in my Inspiron 8000. I upgraded to a 30gig Fujitsu two years ago, which rotates at a slow 4x00 rpm, but hard drive access improved significantly probably due to the denser platters. So I imagine the faster Hitachi drives would make for an incredible difference from where you're at.

 

[downhiller80]

I see IBM do 7200rpm laptop drives, should be a significant improvement over this dog of a 4200rpm drive.

 

[downhiller80]

http://www.hgst.com/hdd/travel/tr7k60.htm

 

[bacillus]

you'll find the 7K60 surprisingly cool & quiet for such a high performance hdd!