Notebook Hardrive Upgrade Advice

[DanStp]

Hi I have an old Thinkpad P3 850, and I want to upgrade the HD. I am looking in the 40 to 60 GIG range. Which would be best? A 5400 rpm drive with 16 meg of cache, or a 7200 rpm drive with 8 meg of cache?

Thanks in advance🙂

 

[BMW330ci]

Check out the Seagate 100GB 5400RPM vs the Hitachi 7200RPM comparison

I honestly don't think cache makes a huge difference. RPM does.

 

[corkyg]

Check with IBM - it all depends on what your BIOS supports.

 

[psykik]

rpm! rpm! rpm!

This wins the day in all notebook scenarios for serious computing.

go rpm always with a notebook.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Just check the power usage. Being an old system, the battery life probably isn't that great in the first place, and as the battery ages it gets even worse. Just make sure the new drive isn't going to suck the life out compared to the old one. As long as the system supports the drive size, you should be fine no matter what. But the Hitachi 7200RPM drive is surprisingly low power for the speed, only slightly more than the Seagate Momentus 5400.2, and might even be lower power than your old drive.

Keep an eye on the price too of course.

I upgraded my Toshiba P-M 1.6GHz from a 4200RPM, 2MB cache drive to a 5400RPM, 16MB cache drive, and honestly it's hard to tell the difference in most cases, despite the increased speed AND octupled cache size. Outlook loads a tad faster, that's about it I think. I hardly see any difference in anything else, nothing I could definitely say "wow this is so much faster".