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I have a Acer Aspire 5920G.

  • Intel C2D T9300
  • 4 GB DDR2
  • 320GB HDD

Will it be a good idea to upgrade the HDD to a 7k+ RPM 1? I think that the HDD is the bottleneck alot of times

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I like the Western Digital Scorpio Black series. Yes go with 7200rpm. – Moab Apr 10 '11 at 1:31
What metrics are you measuring for "Upgrade"? Battery life? Speed? Cost? – Tyler K. Apr 10 '11 at 2:21

2 Answers

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It's true that the hard disk performance is the single biggest performance limiting factor in a system. IME, laptops seem slower because they usually use slower (5k rpm) disks than desktops. If you want the performance then get the upgrade. But it's a trade-off in battery life since 7k also use more power.

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I agree with Keith. Just wanted to add that sometimes heat can be an issue when moving up to a 7200 RPM drive. – Chris_K Apr 10 '11 at 3:50
I'd also say the battery life tradeoff is worth it, because even if you get a little less time, you get much more done with it. – Mark Sowul Apr 10 '11 at 16:47
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Definitely. Incidentally I'd avoid Seagate; they appear to do well but I find the laptop drives at least tend to suffer from horrendous performance if the cache gets overloaded. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/01/19/engineering-the-windows-7-windows-experience-index.aspx. But I haven't had one in the last year and a half or so. Hitachi has always done well for me. I have a 500 GB travelstar I picked up for about 120 or so and it is great.

I'm extremely disappointed MS didn't preserve this cap, but surely the hard drive manufacturers cowed them into reverting it. Just like Intel and "Vista Capable."

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