Noticeable performance hit from installing Vista on an 5400rpm drive?

[AntiFreze]

I have a unique HDD predicament, but and easy fix would be to install Vista on a 60gb 5400rpm WD drive. Would I notice a significant sluggishness from using an older slower drive just for the OS? thoughts?

 

[CurseTheSky]

Yes.

I would HIGHLY recommend against anything slower than 7200 RPM for the OS drive. If it's a laptop and you don't have any other choice, it'll be tolerable, but otherwise avoid it at all cost.

 

[Binky]

Yes +1.

For a modern computer, HD speed might be the most perceptible speed increase you can buy. In other words, an SSD is WELL worth the obscene price per GB.

 

[Emulex]

yah anything less than ssd would be pitiful slow

 

[RU482]

yeah, I was building a computer for my son. It actually has a faster CPU than my machine (2.7GHz vs 2.4Ghz X2 athlon), but I only had a 2.5" 5400RPM drive on hand. my machine feels like a rocket compared to that.

 

[kmmatney]

Its not the 5400 RPMm that matters so much - its that a 60GB hard drive will be very old and slow. Some of the newer "green" 5400 RPM drives are decently fast, but anything that old will run like a dog.

 

[C1]

This is actually true. Tomshardware assessed HDD speed based on overall performance & the difference between 5400 & 7200 isnt that much (few %). The important thing is drive selection. I actually prefer new lower speed drives for data archive that have an outstanding (5 star) reliability rating versus 7200 rpm. That's because they generally run cooler & there is a difference Ive found between being exothermic versus endothermic (ie, there's a difference between a drive that runs inherently hot versus a drive that inherently runs cooler but sits in a warmer environment).

 

[Beautiful_Life]

Well I've a laptop with a 5400rpm HDD. It's running Windows 7 very well. I think it's pretty snappy. It has no bloatware , no updates and 0 customization because it's a family computer, so I don't want any breakdown, bugs glitches whatever. I still feel comfortable using it even though my own laptop has a SSD. It reboots in 70 seconds and Firefox takes a second or two to load.

A 7200rpm HDD will give you a noticeable increase in responsiveness. Screw the benchmarks, it's really faster than a 5400rpm HDD. It cost just a little more, so I don't see much reason not to buy one.

The cache also makes alot of difference. A HDD with 16mb cache will be much faster than one with 8mb. I'm not talking about benchmarks, I mean real normal computer usage.

 

[Emulex]

latency - 5400rpm latency is huge compared to 7200rpm or SSD.

that's the law of physics there you can't change

 

[tommo123]

well, i have win7 installed on a netbook (NC10) and it runs fine. i would imagine readyboost or whatever it's called helps a fair bit. i don't notice any slowdowns in opening anything up, only processing.

i would imagine that it would be similar for Vista also. if you have to go for a slow HDD, i'd get more memory

 

[techs]

In my experience, Vista is far more dependent on hard drive speed than Win7.
What I have seen on many computers is the huge amount of hard drive access that Vista requires.
So, a slower hard drive can have a real difference in Vista, especially if you have a relatively small amount of memory, because that increases page file use.

 

[tommo123]

oh, pausing the indexer helps a lot - especially when it doesn't work properly anyways/ try and find a file you've just moved over and it can't see it till it indexes again. stopping the indexer takes a few secs but at least you get results

 

[techs]

oh, pausing the indexer helps a lot - especially when it doesn't work properly anyways/ try and find a file you've just moved over and it can't see it till it indexes again. stopping the indexer takes a few secs but at least you get results

Yes, I failed to mention in my post above that is one of the major drive access components of Vista.