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IBM T30, 5400 RPM vs. 7200 RPM HD

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Barryng

Member
Joined
Nov 16, 2001
I have an IBM T30 laptop with a 40 Gig 5400 RPM hard drive. It has a 2.0 Gig P4, 512 Mb of memory, and runs XP Pro. Although I have been pleased with this laptop, it is very slow. Boot times are excessively long and applications take longer than expected to load. It has been this way since it was brand new.

Since hard drives are relatively inexpensive, I have been thinking about changing the HD to a 7200 RPM drive. It is not a matter of capacity as I only use just less than half the 40 Gig available. I am interested in thoughts about the effects on performance with the faster drive. I don't mind buying the drive for a consequential improvement but it would make no sense for just marginal gains.

Would increasing the memory from 512 Mb to 1 Gig have any consequential effect?
 
Hi,

Swapping the 5400RPM hard drive for a 7200RPM one is a big improvement. It can be noticed a lot.

About memory, it depends on your system usage. To put it simple, open task manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and look into the performance tab. The bigger the total commit charge number is compared to your amount of physical memory (under regular workload), then the more you need to add more memory.
 
I swiped 5400rpm to 7200rpm the only thing that I noticed was louder operations. Performance remain in my experience ramain same. Maybe in games you will some 1s decrease in map loading.

I am fan of 1gb systems regardless if they are dual or single channel. A system with 1gb memory works very well compared to 512mb.
 
meionm,

Of course if you measure CPU intensive tasks swapping the disk is not going to gain much, but if you compare disk intensive tasks, the gains are not that much subjective... a 7200 disk is generally quite faster than an equally sized 5700 one.... and it can be measured. I have done the swap also, and almost eveything where the disk was involved beame much snappier. In my case I went from a Hitachi 40GB/5400 to a 60GB/7200 7K60 and I did measure a great improvement and in this case an actual *decrease* in general noise level, although the vibration level increased a bit.
To see what you will gain, take into account the media transfer rate increase mb/sec, and the seek time decrease ... not all the disks are the same and it is possible that moving from the faster 5400 disk to the slower 7200 one in the market is no big jump, but in general the gains will be noticeable. Otherwise surf the net.. there are a lot of reviews of these 2.5" disks and mostly all concour with this.
 
meionm said:
I swiped 5400rpm to 7200rpm the only thing that I noticed was louder operations. Performance remain in my experience ramain same. Maybe in games you will some 1s decrease in map loading.

I am fan of 1gb systems regardless if they are dual or single channel. A system with 1gb memory works very well compared to 512mb.

While 1GB is just about a necessity for today's machines, I would say that a 7200RPM drive is roughly equal in terms of performance impact.

I've swapped out many 5400RPM laptop drives for myself and my customers and the difference is noticeable and significant. Loading of everything from programs to the items on the start menu is much faster.

For those who use their laptop for drive-intensive tasks such as photoshop, it's a world of difference, but even "sixpacks" remark about the improvement in the everyday "feel" of a machine.
 
having had bolth a 5400 RPM drive and a 7200 RPM drive, I will absolutely refuse to buy a laptop with anything less than 7200rpm.

I've also jumped from 512 mb to 2gb and I noticed a huge impact there.
 
you did not say if this was a sdram or ddr chipset
kingmax did make pc150 sd-ram sodimms at 1 time
adding faster memory will make a substanstial speed difference
 
Thanks for all the thoughts. I made a decision and ordered an 80 Gig 7200 rpm Hitachi 7K100 and 1 gig of memory. I expect them Wednesday. The machine is an IBM T30 with a 40 gig 5400 rpm drive and 512K memory. Both the hard drive and memory are very easy to change.

The very slow start-up/boot time has been an issue since the machine was new. I am going to time the existing boot time, the time with changing just the hard drive, just the memory, and both. I will post a message to this thread when I have collected all the data.

The memory is 200 pin DDR. I currently have two 256K boards and will be replacing them with a single 1 Gig board (anybody want 512K at a good price?)
 
FTC said:
Hi,

Swapping the 5400RPM hard drive for a 7200RPM one is a big improvement. It can be noticed a lot.
[/qoute]

I didn't notice any improvement, maybe if stared at the notebook I would see a difference. Once 7200rpm got windows and most of the programs installed was pretty close compareable to 5400rpm. I tried to distinguish difference with 3dmark which show that 5400rpm got slightly better score. The drives that I am talking about were seagate 100gb 5400rpm and hitachi 7200rpm both eide used in dell 9300

some illustations: 60gb 7200rpm vs 100gb 5400rpm
s5400h7200z8.jpg


s5400h7200z32.jpg


Maybe if used certain application it would show much greater difference to me or if I paid more attention. I just remember from that whole experience hitach drive clicking noise during writing.

Maybe if I used some
 
find out what ddr speed of memory you have
i would suggest swapping in some ddr 400 200 pin so-dimms
you will not notice faster hard drive speeds
if you you are using slow memory
 
meionm,

If the swap you made is the one on the pictures you show, it is completely normal that you did not see any difference.

The problem is that if you compare a 100GB 5400 *last generation* drive with a 60GB 7200 *first generation* drive such as the 7K60, then the difference in speed is not that much and even more, being the 7200 one smaller, the seek time difference is compensated by the fact that to travel the same amount of GBs the disk head only has to travel half of the way in the bigger disk.

To be fair you have to compare *equally sized* drives that came out at about the same date... for instance, if you compare the 7K100 (100GBs, 7200RPM) drive with the one on your sample you will easily see that it is almost 30% faster in STR (starts at 52MB/sec, ends at about 26MB/sec) and in seek times.. and that IS noticeable.
 
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