Noticable Increase in Speed going from 4200rpm Hard Drive to 5400rpm?

[aphex]

Well after realizing i only had 4gb left on my 40gb hard drive on my T41, decided i should put the money towards a new HD..

Currently have a Hitachi 40gb 4200rpm 2mb Cache hard drive...

Would like to go with at least an 80gb drive...

Would love to get a 7200rpm drive, but the cheapest i see is around $200 for those, while the 80gb 5400rpm drives are over $100 less....

Is the 5400rpm a significant increase in performance over the 4200? Worth the extra to go to 7200?

OLD POST:
IBM T41 (2379) 1.6ghz centrino.
Currently have 768mb of PC2700.
Would going up to 1gb, 1.5gb, or 2gb make a profound difference?
I mainly use my laptop for school, photo editing RAW/NEF files from my Nikon D70 in PS, and for some basic web programming....

 

[DaveSimmons]

_maybe_ for PhotoShop.

RAW files are still only 3-4 x the MP of the camera so 5 MP is 15-20 MB of RAM. If you have several open at once, using tons of layers, etc. that could add up to several hundred MB of RAM but even that by itself wouldn't lead to much disk swapping unless you switched a lot between PhotoShop and another RAM-hungry program.

It's probably not worth the money, though you can always CTRL-ALT-DEL during heavy use to look at the Performance tab.

 

[aphex]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
_maybe_ for PhotoShop.

RAW files are still only 3-4 x the MP of the camera so 5 MP is 15-20 MB of RAM. If you have several open at once, using tons of layers, etc. that could add up to several hundred MB of RAM but even that by itself wouldn't lead to much disk swapping unless you switched a lot between PhotoShop and another RAM-hungry program.

It's probably not worth the money, though you can always CTRL-ALT-DEL during heavy use to look at the Performance tab.

While editing 1 raw, PS shows roughly 250mb.

 

[DaveSimmons]

PS alone is 250 or total is? PS itself is about 62 MB for me (in the processes tab) editing a small 370 KB bitmap.

If you use any filters or layers does the PS memory go much higher?

Even if PS by itself is using 250 MB you should still have plenty of memory on a 768 MB system. If it was going over 400 by itself then moving to 1 GB _might_ make sense.

 

[BillClo]

I've noticed that my system became a lot "snappier" with the upgrade from 512MB to 1GB.

 

[imported_itr]

check your task manager when the laptop is in heavy lead. if it is paging a lot of memory, you'll definatly gain performance by increasing ram.

 

[Auric]

I always say increasing memory capacity cannot increase performance, only decrease or eliminate performance degradation. Once there is 'nuff memory then performance can be increased with a peppier HDD. Although, in cases where there cannot be 'nuff capacity (especially in ye olden days), a peppier HDD can lessen the affect of paging. But yeah, check the Performance tab of Task Manger to discover your particular requirements. I imagine that if there is often insufficient capacity for your useage then enduring paging to and fro' a relatively slow laptop HDD must be painful.

 

[stelleg151]

Im pretty sure you cant run a marketing scheme at 1.6ghz.

 

[0roo0roo]

only if you disc swap a lot..

 

[aphex]

what about hard drives...

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

5400 rpm definitely a lot faster. I switched from a Fujitsu 4200rpm 40gb to a Hitachi 60gb 5400rpm (Inspiron 600m). Of course no comparison to even my old Hitachi 7K250 160gb 7200 rpm desktop drive and no match for my 7200.8.

 

[Anubis]

i would definitly go with a 5400 one if you cant afford the 7200, ps will like it but PS loves ram more then anything going to 2 GB will help but only so much over 1.5, however i did notice the diff between 1.5 and 2 gigs on my comp

on my comp - link in sig just opening PS CS and it eats 56 megs of ram
when the raw converter opens it shoots to 150 i also have a D70 so its the same raw file
after it opens the file its now down to 130 16bit files are huge
lab color shoots it to 180 and auto levels to 225, they just get bigger and bigger

 

[batmanuel]

Dave, man, what's with the underscores for emphasis? AT Forums supports bold, italics and underlining. Don't want to nitpick, but seeing that used in a post gives me scary USENET flashbacks of having to UUDECODE my pr0n. If you dislodge my decade-old memories of doing e-mail with PINE in college, I may have to start drinking just to kill the pain.

 

[alimoalem]

i'm not sure when your post on the ram was but at this moment in time, but a 5400 rpm hard drive (do they even sell these anymore?) that's 80gb is not $100. you can easily get a 160 gb SATA II 7200 rpm drive for under $100 right now.

 

[Jiggz]

I did the same upgrade except I went from 40 GB 4200 2MB Cache to 60 GB 5400 16 MB cache and yes, there is a big difference. But when I went from 512 MB RAMS to 768 MB there was no perceived difference. So highly recommend going for the 5400 and maybe spend some money for RAMs unless you already have 512 MB or more. If you can find a HDD 5400 with more ram cache in it I think it'll be even better. I think they got some with 32MB cache.

 

[Jeff7]

I liked the improvement. 4200rpms just about got me suicidal, waiting for anything to load. Now with 5400rpms, I just feel like killing the computer.
I'm accustomed to a PC with 4 7200rpm drives in RAID 5.

 

[aphex]

Originally posted by: alimoalem
i'm not sure when your post on the ram was but at this moment in time, but a 5400 rpm hard drive (do they even sell these anymore?) that's 80gb is not $100. you can easily get a 160 gb SATA II 7200 rpm drive for under $100 right now.

An IBM T41 is a Laptop.

 

[aphex]

Originally posted by: Jiggz
I did the same upgrade except I went from 40 GB 4200 2MB Cache to 60 GB 5400 16 MB cache and yes, there is a big difference. But when I went from 512 MB RAMS to 768 MB there was no perceived difference. So highly recommend going for the 5400 and maybe spend some money for RAMs unless you already have 512 MB or more. If you can find a HDD 5400 with more ram cache in it I think it'll be even better. I think they got some with 32MB cache.

There is a Toshiba 80gb 5400rpm w/ 16mb cache....

So you guys think the jump from 4200->5400 will be signifant and i shouldnt worry about the 7200rpm?

 

[0roo0roo]

it also depends on if the data density is higher. well it probably is.. i'm not sure they make notebook drives in multiple platters. doubled data density alone would speed things up, let alone the rpm increase.

 

[aphex]

Ended up getting the Toshiba 80gb 5400rpm 16mb Cache... $104 shipped UPS 3 day from newegg....

Now time to sell my Ion 40gb external 2.5" drive...

Thanks!

 

[alimoalem]

Originally posted by: aphex

Originally posted by: alimoalem
i'm not sure when your post on the ram was but at this moment in time, but a 5400 rpm hard drive (do they even sell these anymore?) that's 80gb is not $100. you can easily get a 160 gb SATA II 7200 rpm drive for under $100 right now.

An IBM T41 is a Laptop.

i guess i skipped the first line my bad