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Laptops - memory vs hard drive speed

R

Rob001

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 15, 2004
Messages
85
Which is more useful in a laptop?

Im customizing a dell inspiron 6000 before purchase, and i can either have:

1GB DDR2 memory
100GB 5,400 speed Hard Drive
x300 64MB card

or, for the same price

512MB DDR2 memory
80GB 7,200 speed Hard Drive
x300 128MB card

Im leaning more towards the second option. What do you think?
 
Go with the 7200 HDD, it makes all the difference in the world. You can always add RAM when it goes cheap and 512 will hold you for awhile.
 
I'd go for the second option. I haven't worked on that specific model laptop but if it's like every other laptop in the world, it's a lot easier to add RAM than to upgrade hard drives at a later date. In fact if I were you I'd get the faster harddrive and then just buy another 512 from newegg for $40-50 and install it yourself.
 
Second option. Deciding to put in a faster hard drive later on costs more than deciding to upgrade RAM.

Not to mention if you have the builder put in the RAM for you, you get screwed on prices.
 
Second option - hands down. The main bottleneck is going to be the HDD on a laptop. The faster speed drive will help with this issue.
 
Nomad said:
Second option - hands down. The main bottleneck is going to be the HDD on a laptop. The faster speed drive will help with this issue.
Click to expand...
Yes, but more RAM is going to minimize the impact of this bottleneck. 512 MB isn't enough in this day and age. 1 GB or more is where it's at.
 
I'd go with number 2 as it has a better video card(not by much but still). I'm not sure if you can upgrade the graphics on that model but I would get it with more video memory either way. You can always drop an extra 512 or a gig of system ram later on.
 
Question: Could he not just get a 7200rpm HD and put it in an external enclosure?

Wouldn't channeling that through a USB2.0 or firewire interface be faster than the 5400RPM HD?
 
shoes said:
Question: Could he not just get a 7200rpm HD and put it in an external enclosure?

Wouldn't channeling that through a USB2.0 or firewire interface be faster than the 5400RPM HD?
Click to expand...

External HDDs are always going to be slower than internal ones (except for external SATA). Firewire drives are faster than USB2.0 but as far as I know, no laptops support booting from firewire drives (iBooks/Powerbooks do, but we're talking PCs). Some of them will boot from USB but I haven't seen any that boot firewire. He could get one to use for storage but thats a pretty big pain in the butt to be hauling around everywhere you go.
 
65StangBoy said:
External HDDs are always going to be slower than internal ones (except for external SATA). Firewire drives are faster than USB2.0 but as far as I know, no laptops support booting from firewire drives (iBooks/Powerbooks do, but we're talking PCs). Some of them will boot from USB but I haven't seen any that boot firewire. He could get one to use for storage but thats a pretty big pain in the butt to be hauling around everywhere you go.
Click to expand...

ahh i see

i figured i was probably wrong, but that juice 480mbps transfer rate had me thinking it was possible
 
The second option actually comes with 2 256MB sticks, but I can just sell them and replace them with 2 512MB sticks when I feel the need to. Dell wanted an extra £150 ($280) just to go from 2 256MBs to 2 512MBs. Ridiculous. It'll cost a third of that to do it the way I suggested.

Is it easy to replace memory in a Dell laptop?
 
Get the second one but plan on upgrading your RAM down the road. This will ultimately give you a more capable machine.
 
Installing memory on a notebook is not difficult, there's a panel you remove on the bottom that allows you access to memory slots.

But here's a question though - are both of the memory slots accessible in this machine? Typically, one of the memory slots is not accessible unless you disassemble the notebook, so in the worst case you will only be able to remove one of the 256 MB DIMMs.
 
Care about battery life?

The 7200 rpm drive will probably set you back about 20 minutes on battery life compared to the 5400rpm.
 
Rix2357 said:
Care about battery life?

The 7200 rpm drive will probably set you back about 20 minutes on battery life compared to the 5400rpm.
Click to expand...
I've found there isn't much difference. You'd expect it to hurt a bit but on my laptops (one I upgraded from 5400 to 7200) it was about the same. They said mumbo jumbo about the 7200 drives being made more efficient at the time because of different motors but I don't know about that. But I do know that the upgraded resulted in less time accessing the HDD to boot up or open programs which probably/supposedly helps battery life as much as faster spinning supposedly hurts it.
 
there is a 7-10% performance increase in going from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm and that's not across the whole board. Some applications can use the extra rpm more than others. Personally, I think the ram is much more important but here's what I would do in your situation:

Get the 7200rpm upgrade and then customize your laptop with the min ram, say 256 which should save you another 60-100 bucks. Then go to newegg, crucial, etc and buy 2x 512mb sticks of ram and be done with it. Any laptop running XP should have 1gb of ram...there is just too much gunk and muck with the OS after service pack, updates, etc.

just my 2cents... =)
 
RAM is going to make the biggest performance difference, especially for gaming. 5400rpm vs 7200rpm isn't going to make a HUGE difference unless your running disk intensive applications. With gaming the only thing disk intensive is the intial load which is only a few seconds. It would help if you gave us some pricing info on the RAM and the hard drive. You could just go with the minimum amount of RAM and the smallest slowest hard drive possible and upgrade them both possible cheaper. SODIMM modules can be had farely cheap at Newegg and the Hitachi 80 gig 7200rpm drive runs around $172 shipped at ZipZoomFly.
 
If it's feasible, I'd go for the best gfx card possible, take less ram and slower hard drive.
Ram is cheap to upgrade (not dell - go with newegg) and easy to install. Hard drive partitioning, especially 100GB, will compensate for slower access speed, which is minimal anyway.
Assuming you are speccing the system to suit your current mobile/application needs, your notebook should last longer,(with cheap and easy upgrade options) before needing a replacement.
 
I'd go with the second option as well. Going from 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm, i dont think it's a big different because the only time u can take advantage of it is when the harddrive LED lights up. On the other hand, RAM is always needed for stuff like background apps etc..
 
Go with the least amount of RAM available and upgrade it yourself. Dell's memory prices are ludicrously high.

I would prefer the larger cheaper hard drive. I've never had a program crash, or freeze up because my hard drive wasn't fast enough, but you can have that problem if you don't have enough memory.
 
BladeVenom said:
Go with the least amount of RAM available and upgrade it yourself. Dell's memory prices are ludicrously high.

I would prefer the larger cheaper hard drive. I've never had a program crash, or freeze up because my hard drive wasn't fast enough, but you can have that problem if you don't have enough memory.
Click to expand...

They lowered their prices, so they aren't ridiculous anymore. Still, you can save a few bucks by upgrading through the Egg.
 
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