HD RPMs...is there a big difference?

[blazingdragon12]

I am looking to buy a gaming laptop, but unsure whether the 60 extra for a 7,200rpm HD is going to be worth it...whats the advantages? will my laptop battery run longer with a 5,400 rpm HD? thanks

 

[Rob Williams]

For gaming there shouldn't be much of a difference except for load times. If that doesn't bother you, then stick with the 5400RPM. Battery life is a good question though, and I'm unsure of the answer. You could look at the docs for each of the drives you are looking at and find out their power consumption that way.

 

[Greg King]

I am with Rob on this one. There is a differance but to me, I just dont worry about it to much. If you have an extra 60 bucks burning a hole in your pocket, then by all means get it, but when I price out notebooks, I never consider upgrading the HDD. Storage first, speed second for me.

 

[Rory Buszka]

The faster drives will help with load time, and also with things like video editing, where a lot of data needs to be read quickly from the disk. The mechanical-ness of hard drives presents a major system bottleneck these days, which is why you have so much to-do about hybrid hard drives incorporating memory for pre-fetched data.

 

[Greg King]

For what it's worth, I dont notice a whole lot of a differance between my Raptor and my regular drives.

 

[JacKz5o]

There is a big difference when booting and loading games/files/applications. I would recommend a higher RPM HD but you won't see an FPS increase in your games or a faster benchmark score or anything like that unless you don't have much RAM and are using alot of page files.

 

[Rob Williams]

It would be wise to compare the power usage of a 5,400 drive compared to 7,200 though. If you are on the road a -lot-, then a drive that has a bigger power draw is not going to make things enjoyable. Perhaps that's why my laptop has a > 2 hour battery life... I don't know.

 

[JacKz5o]

It would be wise to compare the power usage of a 5,400 drive compared to 7,200 though. If you are on the road a -lot-, then a drive that has a bigger power draw is not going to make things enjoyable. Perhaps that's why my laptop has a > 2 hour battery life... I don't know.

Are you running XP?

I remember seeing/reading about a patch by M$ a while ago that lowered the un-used USB ports on laptops and people got an average of 30 more minutes from their battery.

Lemme go see if I can find the link...