Help me decide in upgrading my Hard drive SPEED or SPACE

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unkn0vvn_al

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Hey there guys, Im thinking of a project this weekend and its to upgrade my A-one's hard drive. I cant decide though if I will go for the speed or the space.

Help me pick:
-WD 320gb HD 5400rpm 8mb SATA300 - $130
or
-Hitachi 200gb HD 7200rpm 16mb SATA300 - $160

if you have any other suggestions just reply to this post.. please let me know why you decided to go with which hard drive..

I just need your opinions for I cant really decide on my own, I know it matters as to what I will be doing with my A-one but at this point I dont really have anything other than for School and note taking ideas.

THANKS IN ADVANCE!!!!!!
 
I'd go for space. Speed doesn't really matter to me one this machine. Aa1 isn't meant for performance.
 
Hi man,
You cant fit a 3,5" harddrive in the pc, neither a 2,5" one.
You will have to either MOD a CF adapter (ZIF to CF) and hacksaw the adapter a bit (and use a 300x CF card), or buy a microdrive with ZIF interface (1.8").

Afaik the fastest Microdrives are running 4200rpm and have a cache of 2Mb.
I dont know if will speed up things buying the fastest type of SD card and setting the OS swap to the SD card, as the SD slot on the left is mounted on the pci bus, AFAIK.

Ps. performance on my Aspire One on the SSD (slow intel one) is not that bad, with 1.5gb ram and a stripped down vista ultimate (it takes 4gb installed). I can boot up in about 30 seconds, from when I press the power button, to when Im on the desktop and the mouse no longer has the thinking icon.

Ps. I used a VLite vista which is stripped a lot, but it still works well for browsing, etc. Also I will use it to tune my car, so I have also installed megatune and some other stuff :) It works quite well actually.

ps. I have disabled swap, shadow copies, rollback, etc.

I will upgrade to a microdrive 60 or 80gb, but right now, Im on vacation with my Aspire One :)
 
You can also get a 1,8" hard drive with ZIF/LIF interface (Toshiba for instance).

As for the Hitachi you mention, I installed it in my Mac Mini a few months ago and it's brilliant. My computer is totally transformed, it's now as fast as I could hope.
 
olavxxx said:
Hi man,
You cant fit a 3,5" harddrive in the pc, neither a 2,5" one.
Click to expand...

Actually you can fit a 2.5" because thats whats inside right now, its actually a hitachi brand(mine is the one with the 120gb hd).

Its seems like and SSD would be nice for speed and Im sure also for the battery but Im not really that good in having to do those things that you are telling me to do.. I really just wanted to swap the HD that I got inside my A-one with a new one.

Thanks for the nice info though!
 
unkn0vvn_al said:
olavxxx said:
Hi man,
You cant fit a 3,5" harddrive in the pc, neither a 2,5" one.
Click to expand...

Actually you can fit a 2.5" because thats whats inside right now, its actually a hitachi brand(mine is the one with the 120gb hd).
Click to expand...
In the HDD yes, you can fit one. I'm not sure about the SSD version though, because the bottom of the case is different and you'd need to solder a SATA connector on the motherboard (and pray it would work ;). If you purchased the HDD version then everything's fine.
 
We cannot answer this question for you.

I would go for speed because faster is ALWAYS better but bigger is only better if you are actually going to use the space. Most people won't use their laptot as their principal machine and so only need enough space for whatever they are working on at the moment.

For example, my main machine is a MacBook Pro. It has an almost full 250GB drive but well over half of that is music and photographs which are not kept anywhere else (except backups). I would not need (or even want) to carry all that around with me all the time.

You need to tell us more about how you expect to use the machine and to think about how much data you will ever store on it. I don't expect to use more than 20-30GB on mine so even 200GB would be overkill but as I mentioned above, any increase in speed will make a difference all the time you use it.
 
go for the 5400rpm one, the 7200rpm will kill what little battery life it has
plus, the 5400rpm has more space
 
7200 rpm drives use marginally more current than 5400, so it wouldn't be a problem. I'd be more concerned about heat and noise.
 
You must be joking : my Mac Mini was sluggish with its stock 5400 rpm drive, now with the 7200 Hitachi it's just as fast as I could hope. It makes hell of a difference.
 
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