Laptop Hard Drive Spin Speed

[04nmr85]

I've been looking around at laptops for the past couple of weeks and i've noticed a lot of the hard drives in them spin at less then 7200 RPM. I just looked at a Vaio and it's hard drive spin speed was 4200 RPM. Is there a real noticeable difference as the speed gets lower? Would it affect seek time greatly? What other things would be affected? Also, i was just wondering if Sony Vaio's are alright to look into. I know Toshiba makes good laptops, just wondering about sony. Any info would be great! Thanks in advance!

[glc]

Sony laptops are decent quality, styled beautifully, very proprietary, and overpriced.

4200 rpm is mainstream speed for laptop hard drives but more and more manufacturers are going to 5400 rpm for mainstream. 7200 rpm is still high end.

[LaptopExtreme]

Yes there's a big difference between 4200 and 5400, but you wont notice much between 5400 to 7200 unless you're working with large files. Remember that these are max speeds and wont stay at the max speeds at all times. Many companies are throwing in 4200's to keep costs down, the heat down and the battery drain down. If someone had a laptop with a 5400 and keeps complaining about the heat generated underneath or at the palm rest, I'd recommend them switching to a lower speed and it'll suck less battery life too.

[glc]

LE: Just for your info, I have a 20gb Seagate Momentus 2mb cache 5400 rpm drive in my Thinkpad T20, and it's almost totally silent and runs cool. I'm very impressed with these drives and they aren't too easy to find.

[LaptopExtreme]

Yes, the Seagate Momentus runs a bit cooler than the Hitachi's. Different systems have different placement of the HD's. Some of the Dells keyboard tend to heat up like crazy; on the HP DV1000, the bottom gets pretty darn hot, and on some of the Asus models, they're right under the left palmrest. Heat is a subjective matter and some people really are sensitive over it.