4200RPM vrs 5400RPM laptop HD

[paperfist]

Howdy,

Do you think I would notice a difference in performance going from a 40GB 4200RPM ATA100 HD to a larger 5400RPM ATA100 HD in a laptop?

It's a compaq (older) nx9110 with a 2.8GHz P4. It had 512MB of RAM on Win XP Pro, but I just bumped that up to 2GB total and even after a 3 hour defrag (never been done?) it's still sluggish launching aps. Internet is snappy, aps nappy...

I could try trimming down the nearly 60 processes running, but I don't think that will do much. It's spyway/anti-virus free as far as I can tell.

Thanks for the input

 

[OS]

4200 rpm is quite slow

even at the same rotational speed, significantly larger drives with higher areal density are usually faster, so if you get a big enough drive and a higher rotational speed, it should be significantly faster.

i do not have experience with your particular situation but in the past even when i only upgraded a hard drive in a system i did notice it was faster.

 

[watzup_ken]

A bump in the RPM should make things a little more snappy, but do note that 5400rpm is actually still sluggish from my opinion.

 

[Compman55]

7200RPM drives are no longer available in IDE. Only SATA......... 5400RPM is just fine for the slow notebook they are in.

If you do upgrade, make certain to reinstall windows FROM SCRATCH, not from a ghost image!!!!!!! "Bit Rot" is also part of your issue, windows gets crappy over lets say a 2-3 yr period even if perfectly maintained & updated. Your 40GB 4200RPM drive is hardly capable of 20 MB/sec, probably slower than an external USB drive..... A newer 5400 rpm drive will probably do at least 45MB/sec sustained.

I have benchmarked many laptop drives, and read reviews before narrowing down the following 2. I picked the samsung for its faster speed.

Here is a samsung spinpoint 5400rpm 160GB that is better than all my older hitachi 7k60's and 7k100's. Ok ,I guess it doesn;t blow them away, but at 7200rpm vs 5400rpm this one still scores better and feels just as good if not slightly better.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822152110

If capacity is needed this one by WD will have alot more GB, but will benchmark slightly slower. I was almost going to buy this one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136345

 

[paperfist]

Thanks for the info guys.

I was thinking 'Bit Rot' could be an issue too, but it's going to be a major undertaking doing a fresh install. That's why I've been cleaning everything up, going through the running processes, etc. It's for a workspace environment and the people that use them hardly have a working understanding of a computer let alone what files they may need to save

As far as I know 7200RPM isn't an option as the system won't support it. Will check into it a little more.

 

[OS]

i've never seen a hard drive not supported only because of rotational speed

 

[paperfist]

i've never seen a hard drive not supported only because of rotational speed

I'm assuming 7200RPM will require SATA which means it's not supported by the laptop.

 

[Blain]

Have you run any diagnostics on the 4200rpm drive, to make sure the sectors are operating up to par?
If the old HD is slowly becoming degraded, a new 5400rpm HD may breathe some new life into the PC.
The newer drive will have more cache as well as a higher platter density.

Have you tried adjusting XP for "performance" rather than "appearance"?

 

[RaistlinZ]

I'm assuming 7200RPM will require SATA which means it's not supported by the laptop.

Is this an issue only with laptops? I could have sworn we used 7200rpm IDE drives in desktops back in the day.

Nevertheless, I bet a cheap $400 netbook will kick the crap out of your old P4 laptop though. Maybe it's time to upgrade instead of pouring more money into an old laptop. The money you're spending on extra RAM and a new HDD could better be spent on a new machine.

 

[Emulex]

yeah IDE is so slow its pointless. seriously i've tried this on a TC4200. nothing helps not even 7200rpm ide.

a walmart $299 special with a $99 G2 microcenter ssd will lay waste big time.

hell my panasonic W8 i just got with the G2 microcenter ssd will smoke it all day long.

 

[Blain]

I don't think users that "hardly have a working understanding of a computer" could justify the added expense of a totally new PC, much less a mind-blowing killer-fast SSD, for the regular tasks they perform.

 

[paperfist]

Have you run any diagnostics on the 4200rpm drive, to make sure the sectors are operating up to par?
If the old HD is slowly becoming degraded, a new 5400rpm HD may breathe some new life into the PC.
The newer drive will have more cache as well as a higher platter density.

Have you tried adjusting XP for "performance" rather than "appearance"?

That helped a little bit which adds to the overall improvements, thanks.

I culled the process down to 42 and eliminated 5-6 programs from loading at startup. That helped too, but the actual startup process is slow, you can just see the HD light going crazy trying to keep up. Anyway, I also used another defrag program which produced the best results (Smartdefrag) with programs launching in a snappier manner now. So once everything is loaded up at startup it runs a lot closer to normal for what it is.

I haven't run any diagnostics, can you recommend any programs?

 

[paperfist]

Is this an issue only with laptops? I could have sworn we used 7200rpm IDE drives in desktops back in the day.

Nevertheless, I bet a cheap $400 netbook will kick the crap out of your old P4 laptop though. Maybe it's time to upgrade instead of pouring more money into an old laptop. The money you're spending on extra RAM and a new HDD could better be spent on a new machine.

We did, 7200RPM was the norm in desktops. They still are the minority in laptops.

Nah, I have a Asus Eee netbook, what a PoS The laptop may be a little older but its specs are superior to the netbooks with their Atom processors.

Anyway, this is for a non-profit organization that primarily uses the internet/email and Office aps during the day. You'd be surprised just how fast their old desktop computers can run these aps compared to a modern computer. My quad core I'm using now can open these aps not much faster then they can and all it took was a $40 upgrade in RAM on the desktops they use.

On the laptop I've invested some time sure, but $40 for RAM and possibly another $50 on a HD and they're golden. If I had to upgrade 15 computer to new ones were talking $12k vrs the $900 I've spent so far. P4's are no slouch

 

[Emulex]

IDE is the problem non overlapping i/o (ncq). you can get IDE SSD but its very expensive.

I have plenty of P4 with sata using X25-V - they are faster than a 3.0ghz core2duo with a 7200rpm drive since cpu goes unused when its waiting for hard drive.

Even better is virtualization. i took laptops with 3gb of ram and IDE 7200rpm drives and now they are VM's. They have 1.5gb of ram and share a 6 disk raid set (15K SAS raid-10) - the vm's are 4-8x faster now - and thanks for esxi ram-dedupe for similar o/s & thin provisioning they use 1/4 the resources. lol.

VDI/THIN client'ing those old laptops and rocking a single server with DAS SAS storage is a great idea if they are connected.

 

[paperfist]

IDE is the problem non overlapping i/o (ncq). you can get IDE SSD but its very expensive.

I have plenty of P4 with sata using X25-V - they are faster than a 3.0ghz core2duo with a 7200rpm drive since cpu goes unused when its waiting for hard drive.

Even better is virtualization. i took laptops with 3gb of ram and IDE 7200rpm drives and now they are VM's. They have 1.5gb of ram and share a 6 disk raid set (15K SAS raid-10) - the vm's are 4-8x faster now - and thanks for esxi ram-dedupe for similar o/s & thin provisioning they use 1/4 the resources. lol.

VDI/THIN client'ing those old laptops and rocking a single server with DAS SAS storage is a great idea if they are connected.

How much will it cost me for your consulting fees?

I'd love to do that, it's in the works, but I can't get enough time to research it. All the laptops/desktops are already tied into Win2003Server, but the only thing it was ever setup for was picture sharing lol

 

[Emulex]

if it was a non-profit and local i'd do it for free.

IDE SSD would breathe alot of life into them. perhaps you can find a donator.