Laptop users (including Netbooks) upgrade to 7400 RPM HDD's

That's funny.. how about an article that seems to suggest SSDs don't do so well if you use them all day long. Solving the SSD latency bug.

I used to have a HP envy with 2SSDs in RAID 0. I got rid of it as quickly as possible. It could get a decent framerate at almost any game it fit the specs for but pushed out enough heat to cook an egg inside the shell in 20 minutes.

madtownidiot said:

The problem with putting an i7 in a laptop 14" or smaller, especially a high end i7 with an nvidia gtx series or ATI/AMD HD4XXX+ series, no matter what you do, it's going to overheat. The wattage a laptop consumes results in every bit as much heat as a light bulb of the same wattage. With air cooling, the amount of air a fan can take in at any given velocity is roughly the square root of the volume that can be displaced by a single rotation. If you quadruple the power consumption of any machine without improving the thermal design it's pretty much guaranteed to die before the warranty expires, and most laptops that fit the above description require at least 1 hardware RMA in the first year. The average 7200 RPM HDD consumes 3-4 watts max, less than a .125 watts unless it's reading or write, so any additional heat is coming from other components, not the HDD.. at least not directly. If switching from a 5400 rpm to a 7200 rpm HDD produces any more heat, it's because the 5400 rpm HDD was throttling the system.

Hi there

so far my Netbook doesn't seem to be running any hotter -- I can't see going from 700 ma (5400 RPM) disk to 800 ma (7200 RPM) disk is going to be significant at all - especially if the actual read / write / data access times are smaller as well.

The 7200 RPM drives also have a larger internal buffer which with the decent pre-fetch / pre-read algorithms in W7 use very well the REAL power consumption of the HDD in use might actually be LESS on a Windows session than with the 5400 RPM drive.

There is almost NO difference in consumption when these drives are just idling BTW.

Also but not so much a "measureable" quantity but because I can get my work done QUICKER the laptop might not be on for so long either -- and in any case I tend to use my Laptop where there IS power -- I'm lucky as on my Current contract in France the TGV trains are all equipped with Power Sockets as well as the Eurostar which I also use when travelling from UK to France.

Anything that SIGNIFICANTLY speeds up the user experience IMO is worthwhile -- there is almost nothing as bad as twiddling thumbs while waiting for an application to start or getting a response back from the machine.

Incidentally --although a different topic - research shows that if a response hasn't come back within as little as 3 seconds on a web site users will navigate away from that site --- although of course Net access speed has nothing to do with this topic BTW.

All in all even though there *could* be a downside IMO the upgrade was REALLY worth it.

Cheers
jimbo

Most laptops and netbooks are also crippled by deficient power supply.