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RPMs or Cache?

K

Kekewy

Member
My laptop's hard drive has decided it's time to die and has begun the a long, slow decent into death. I'd like to replace it quickly as I'm getting ready to go out of town and would like to take it with me when I do.

As cash is rather short, I'm unable to spend any more than 70 dollars total on an HDD, that's with shipping and everything. I'd like to stay with either WD, Seagate or HP brands. I found two on newegg I'm rather torn between, one is a 320gig WD scorpio black with a 16mb cache and 7200rpms the other is a 500 gig WD with a 32mb cache but only 5400rpms.

I should note that this is not a gaming laptop. The most I gaming I do on it is Sims 2 and possibly WoW. For the most part I watch movies on it, use MS word and Excel, putter around on the internet and use photoshop.

If I had more time and funds, I'd dig around until I found a drive with both a high RPM and a high cache, but it looks like I'm going to have to sacrifice one for the other unless someone busts out a killer sale. For what I'm looking to use the laptop for, which would be more important? The RPMs or the cache?
 
Well, I just recently bought a laptop, and I must say that the 5400 RPM hard drive that came with it was VERY slow.

I switched it out with a Scorpio Black 160GB, and it's a lot better.

The extra RPMs really are nice to have.

So I would say take the 7200 RPM drive.
 
More power and heat for the faster drive. If your laptop can handle the load, it's all good. Too bad you don't have the funds to spring for the Seagate hybrid. It's got a 4Gb cache, with smart logic to keep often used files in it, and it's 7200 RPM.

From a price/performance/capacity perspective, I'm of the opinion that no other drive currently available deserves to be in a single bay laptop as much as the hybrid. But it's about 40 percent more than you're willing to spend.
 
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