7200rpm HDD

dermo1990

Hi,
I have a dell studio 1558 with a core i5-520m, 4GB DDR3 RAM, Windows 7 pro 64bit. I have been thinking about upgrading my hard drive up to a 7200 RPM one. Would it be worthwhile to do this and would i notice any significant performance changes?

alancuran

It depends how you use your laptop, if you play games or edit graphics or things like this than for sure.

Deano12345

dermo1990 wrote: »

Hi,
I have a dell studio 1558 with a core i5-520m, 4GB DDR3 RAM, Windows 7 pro 64bit. I have been thinking about upgrading my hard drive up to a 7200 RPM one. Would it be worthwhile to do this and would i notice any significant performance changes?

Random Read/Writes will be faster, and there will be a small increase in access times so it will feel slightly faster, downside is shorter battery life, so there will be a difference, not a large enough one to notice really. If your looking for a performance gain, look into SSD's

hearny

+1 for the SSD if performance is what you are after. Obviously price is a lot higher but if you are not in any rush you could wait for them to drop.

opus

Guess it depends on what speed drive is in there already as to how much you'll notice.

Did something similar myself recently as I've an almost five year old Dell d420 that had a dog slow 4200rpm drive. Instead of spending on a new laptop I bought a new battery (via ebay) & a 60Gb SSD drive (from memoryc) for a total cost of ~€150 which has made a huge difference to its performance.

dermo1990

Thanks for the input, i'd probably hold off upgrading to an ssd any time soon given the prices are still fairly steep and it'd be a while until the price per gb starts to fall in a measurable manner. That said, my own drive runs at about 5400rpm, so the jump in performance mightn't be worth the hassle. i was only looking into the thought of upgrading the hdd since my boot times(around 2mins) and program loading isnt doing the i5 justice...

Deano12345

dermo1990 wrote: »

Thanks for the input, i'd probably hold off upgrading to an ssd any time soon given the prices are still fairly steep and it'd be a while until the price per gb starts to fall in a measurable manner. That said, my own drive runs at about 5400rpm, so the jump in performance mightn't be worth the hassle. i was only looking into the thought of upgrading the hdd since my boot times(around 2mins) and program loading isnt doing the i5 justice...

It shouldnt take 2 mins, my toshiba with a 5400RPM drive and an i3 will boot to usable desktop in around 45 seconds

hearny

Sounds like you would be better off diagnosing why it takes so long. You either have a ridiculous amount of programs running on start up or you need to figure out what is causing problems.

First thing I would do is check the windows event logs for errors on startup.

You should also run scans with malwarebytes and super antispyware (not at the same time).

defrag the hard drive.

Do you have antivirus software installed.
Make sure there is not more than one antivirus package installed.

dermo1990

I've been trying to rectify this problem for some time, and i already have optimized msconfig to operate with 4 cores and i have purged non essential programs from the startup routine. I'm using smart defrag on my laptop which runs a full defrag every week. My security package comprises of avg and comodo firewall....for some reason i have software that conflicts with zonealarm.
The two minutes for boot is from turning on the computer until everything is fully functional...
I havent checked out the startup event log yet though...thanks for the tip

Deano12345

dermo1990 wrote: »

I've been trying to rectify this problem for some time, and i already have optimized msconfig to operate with 4 cores and i have purged non essential programs from the startup routine. I'm using smart defrag on my laptop which runs a full defrag every week. My security package comprises of avg and comodo firewall....for some reason i have software that conflicts with zonealarm.
The two minutes for boot is from turning on the computer until everything is fully functional...
I havent checked out the startup event log yet though...thanks for the tip

Try a re-install of Windows ?

I find MSE to be quicker than AVG aswell, maybe worth giving it a shot. Run CCleaner if you haven't already

dermo1990

this laptop originally had 7 home premium on it, which i had boot times a little over a minute on. Since i had access to a free copy of 7 professional from college, i decided to install it, after reformatting the drive of course (last september) i did notice that 7 professional was a bit slower to boot up. though that could be the os itself or it may have been a bad install.

I would prefer to stay with avg and comodo since my dad's laptop had security essentials on it and within a day or so of running it, he got a virus which somehow caused the computer from recognising any user input about 10 seconds after boot was complete...had to wipe the os and its not something i would care to repeat anytime soon.

hearny

Personally I rather Microsoft SE over AVG too.

You never mentioned Spyware scans. This is very important.

Are all of your drivers up to date or did you just leave Windows 7 take care of them.

Take a look in device manager for any missing drivers.

Deano12345

hearny wrote: »

Personally I rather Microsoft SE over AVG too.

You never mentioned Spyware scans. This is very important.

Are all of your drivers up to date or did you just leave Windows 7 take care of them.

Take a look in device manager for any missing drivers.

All this, and check your drives health with HDTune too !

dermo1990

Ran hdtune, hdd is in perfect health and there's no existance of any damaged sectors. Malware scans came back clean bar a few tracking cookies, and no performance improvement has resulted. All drivers are up to date according to the sites of the varying manufacturers...I'm starting to think a clean install may be necessary...are there any other options?

Deano12345

dermo1990 wrote: »

Ran hdtune, hdd is in perfect health and there's no existance of any damaged sectors. Malware scans came back clean bar a few tracking cookies, and no performance improvement has resulted. All drivers are up to date according to the sites of the varying manufacturers...I'm starting to think a clean install may be necessary...are there any other options?

Did you run the HDtune benchmark by any chance ?

dermo1990

For reading :transfer rate min: 4.9 Mb/s
max: 81.2 Mb/s
avg: 54.6 Mb/s
access time 18.7 ms
burst rate 161.1 Mb/s
CPU usage 7%.
Couldnt run the write benchmark since i would need to remove my other partition to do it

Deano12345

dermo1990 wrote: »

For reading :transfer rate min: 4.9 Mb/s
max: 81.2 Mb/s
avg: 54.6 Mb/s
access time 18.7 ms
burst rate 161.1 Mb/s
CPU usage 7%.
Couldnt run the write benchmark since i would need to remove my other partition to do it

Thats fine, this really is an odd problem altogether, a re-install is probably your best bet

dermo1990

possibly...it may be due to a bad install(if theres such a thing), given this os was installed from a flash drive, i dont really see if this could be an issue. Anyway thanks for the help and i'd probably hold off the install for a few weeks until my exams are over, its just the waiting gets a bit annoying for whats under the hood

Deano12345

dermo1990 wrote: »

possibly...it may be due to a bad install(if theres such a thing), given this os was installed from a flash drive, i dont really see if this could be an issue. Anyway thanks for the help and i'd probably hold off the install for a few weeks until my exams are over, its just the waiting gets a bit annoying for whats under the hood

Ive had some OS installs from flash drives go awry, I woudlnt rule it out

dermo1990

Think i would agree...when i installed win 7 pro, it seemed as though the computer was booting somewhat slower than with home premium. at the time i assumed that the os wasnt exploiting the i5, but a bad install really seems a lot more likely