What effect will a higher RPM HD have on battery life?

[SkdMrkLcy]

I want to change the HD in my laptop as it makes a lot of strage idle noise for some reason. I have tested the drive and it is fine but it just bugs me. I was looking and I can get a 5400 Toshiba with 16 MB Cache pretty cheap, or a samsung with 8 MB Cache.

My question is what Laptop HD brands are good, and also what kind of impact will I see by going from a 4200 drive to a 5400 rpm drive on my battery life.

I am not looking for exact figures but a basic idea.

Also any idea why a Hitachi 4200 HD would make so much noise at idle but still function fine.

Laptop if it matters:
12.1" SONY VAIO V505DC1
Pentium M 1.4
Radeon 9200 32MB
256 MB RAM (Going to double this as well)
40 Gig Hitachi HD 4200
DVD/CD-RW

 

[addragyn]

Laptop drives get noisy because they have rough lives. Even if you handle the machine with kid gloves it may happen when it's not properly handled before being put into the laptop (why I hate buying drives from Newegg).

If the drive is old enough you might actually bet better battery life. Either way the power differences are really neglible - go check the spec sheet on the manf. website. It might be a few minutes at most.

You will notice a difference in startup and program startup with the newer drive. Do a new OS install to really get the full benefit.

My favorite laptop drives come from Hitachi. Reliable and fast. Somebody benched those 16MB cache Toshiba and the 8MB cache Hitachi beat it. I'm sure Google could find it.

Found it: http://www.barefeats.com/hard27.html

 

[jvarszegi]

I have an Inspiron 8200; it came with a 40GB 5400RPM hard drive when new, I don't remember the manufacturer. I upgraded it recently to a Hitachi Travelstar 60GB 7200RPM (the Travelstar brand and drive business was acquired by Hitachi from IBM recently). The new drive has an 8MB cache, and it's just awesome.

Lots of people have been saying that the performance increase is huge from 4200 RPM to 5400, and not so much from there to 7200. I don't know about the truth of that, but I can tell you that the performance of my machine is a lot better now. It used to take well over a minute to boot up (it has a 2GHz P4-M and 1GB of RAM); now it takes forty seconds flat. Restoring from standby takes about one second. Regretfully I didn't measure compile times before, but compile times for my large projects (I'm a programmer) have been cut in half or maybe much less than that. Microsoft Word launches in one second (the first time after startup, faster than that afterwards due to the caching I've enabled in the OS). The new drive is also super-quiet.

Battery life is basically identical; I did measure this, and after the swap I actually picked up two minutes, nothing major or even repeatable. If you read Hitachi's documenation on this drive, it actually consumes slightly less power than their slightly older 5400 RPM models; they apparently built in lots of power-saving features, such as a smaller drive head which results in less power required to move it back and forth. I guess the spindle is only one source of power drain in a drive, and not necessarily the biggest one; I don't really know.

If you upgrade your hard drive, you should pick up an external USB 2.0 hard-drive enclosure and convert your old one into a handy backup device. You can find them for as little as twenty dollars these days, maybe even less on sale. If you do the upgrade yourself (which you should), just be very careful taking out the old drive so that you don't bend the pins. Putting in the new one is a piece o' cake.

Unless you want to reinstall everything, you'll probably want to consider buying a transfer kit; this'll transfer all the bits from your old drive to your new one, so Windows/Linux will just come up with no modifications after the swap. They aren't free, though.

 

[cy7878]

check the manufacture specs. The power consumption is what you need to compare. As far as I know a modern 7200rpm drive comsumes about the same power as a 4200rpm drive from a couple years back.

 

[SkdMrkLcy]

I also found a article over on Toms and it said basicly the same thing.

I would go for the 7200 but do not want to spend that much. I can only go around 100 or so now and need to get it done before school. I have all the stuff I need to move the data but will more than likely just do a fresh load on it.

I was looking at the toshiba as the Hitachi is the brand I have now that is bugging me and the toshibas that I sell at work do not have the same problem.

The brands I can get are:
Samsung
Seagate
Toshiba
Hitachi
Fujitsu

Any other opinions out there.

Oh and the drive I have now is brand new but still does it, like I said I think it is fine it just bothers me.

 

[ThunderPC]

I recently replaced my 4200RPM drive with a hitachi 7200. Battery consumption has been unnoticeable

 

[Abhi]

Dell replaced my 60 GB 4200 rpm HDD with a 60 gb 5400 rpm disk yesterday....

No change in battery life as far as i can tell...

Laptop does seem snappier though...

 

[Abhi]

Correction ...did a few tests...

The speed has increased signicantly!!!

The fresh install also helps obviously...

MS Word, Oultook are launching SUPER fast... can hardly see the splash screen... It wasnt this fast ever before...

(2.4 ghz, 512 mb RAM)

 

[SkdMrkLcy]

Well I have a 5400 RPM drive on the way. I did not want another Hitachi and could not afford a 7200 rpm. I got the Toshiba drive.

I also have another 256 MB stick on the way and will be doing a clean install on my Vaio as well.

Hope to have it all going by wendsday or so.

 

[3chordcharlie]

Laptops and desktops have the same bottlenecks.. I can't believe anyone would say 7200 doesn't make a difference in a laptop!

Since the HDD is the slowest thing in your computer - even if you managed to have a 500mhz P3 and a raptor in the same system - any improvement will make the computer noticably more responsive.

 

[DongTran]

Ever since I slapped in my 40gb 5400RPM to replace the 20gb 4200RPM in my Sony SRX77, the battery life just went to hell. I think it's just coincedence though, all the Sonys I have owned have had sucky batteries that just die after like 2 years or something.

I consider myself lucky if I get 20 minutes out of a full charge...

 

[SkdMrkLcy]

I have found most batterys in laptops only last about a year with heavy use. I generally only keep one for the time I am in class and sell when I am out for the summer. I then buy new when I go back. It keeps it up to date and does not really cost me that much.

The last one I had was an iBook and I sold it for more than I paid six months later.