>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>When I see a lot of good deals for notebooks you can buy today (PCConnection, TigerDirect, etc.) most of them come with hard drives working at 5400 rpm. I have always had drives of 7200 rpm. Will I notice the slowdown of things I do on my notebook (mostly developing, testing, introducing more bugs <g>, more testing, building, UT reading, IE browsing) if I go with 5400 rpm?
>>
>>The fastest disk access is no disk access at all. Make sure you've got lots of RAM so Windows can cache the disk. For mechanical hard drives, turn on write-behind caching for best performance.
>>
>>Next best is a good SSD like the Intel X25-M. These outperform any mechanical drive, especially on latency, which is what people really tend to notice. Rugged, low power, high performance - the ideal drive for laptops. Only downsides are cost and limited capacity - the X25-M is currently about C$400 for 80GB.
>>
>>Faster-spinning mechanical HDs have lower latency, which is noticeable. They just feel "crisper". They also have higher data transfer rates, assuming similar lineal densities. They do eat a little more power but the difference is negligible compared to screen brightness settings, CPU power settings etc. In a perfect world a 7200rpm drive would be 33% faster (both latency and transfer rate) than an equivalent 5400rpm drive.
>>
>>Avoid cheap SSDs, such as those based on JMicron controllers:
>>http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
>
>I don't think I will go with a SSD; cost and size. And thank you very much for the input on the speed of 5400 vs 7200. As I mentioned in another message, it looks like all "special" (low-priced notebooks) seem to have 5400 rpm drives. I just hope that they will still be compatible with a 7200 rpm drive if I decide to replace one. Unfortunately most specs in on-line sites do not quite indicate if the drive is compatible with a 7200 rpm.

If you have a lot of RAM, the only time your disk gets hit is during boot up, then to load your normally-used programs and data the first time. Then, everything gets cached (especially with write-behind caching enabled). It's a significant cost for a replacement drive, and to get the old cloned to the new - I'm not sure you'd see enough of a real-world difference to justify going from a 5400 to a 7200.

Having said that, laptop drives are plug & play - any machine that will accept a 5400rpm drive will accept an equivalent 7200rpm drive. The one thing you may need to be careful of, especially with budget laptops, is if you want to go with a larger, as well as faster, drive - some BIOSs may not support large drives.