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General discussion

5200RPM vs 7200RPM hard drive for laptop

by jbaker75 May 25, 2009 11:35AM PDT

I am looking to purchase a new laptop. Primarily for home and "take home" business use. I do a lot of modeling in Excel, Matlab, and other number crunching programs. How much of a performance gain will I have upgrading to 7200rpm hard drive? Is it worth it? Most preconfigured laptops seem to come with 5200rpm. What is the biggest difference?

Thanks.
jbaker75

Discussion is locked

3 Posts
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Yes, maybe . . .
by Coryphaeus May 25, 2009 10:54PM PDT

You'll get a litter faster access. Slightly faster booting, maybe. Too many other variables such as RAM, background programs, etc.

As a general rule, yes. But don't expect anything major.

I replaced the 5400 RPM drive in my ThinkPad with a 7200 RPM drive. My main reason was a larger drive (40 Gig to 160). It appears to boot a little faster. Maybe.

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Agree, except
by deniceels May 26, 2009 1:13AM PDT

If you consistently opening up files or saving lots of files, a faster RPM means it'll speed up in it's seek-retrieval, yet, if your harddisk is highly fragmented, it's still going to be slow.

A faster RPM also means more heat, more power needed to run it, though I'm not entirely sure by how much.

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Using number crunching programs you
by orlbuckeye May 26, 2009 4:09AM PDT

won't see a big difference because your not continuously reading/writing to the HD. Excel read the spreadsheet into memory and does the crunching in memory until you save the data which it copies what you have in memory and saves it once.

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