5400 and 7200 hd

[accat13]

My pc is a few years old (in the process of building new one) ,compaq 5bw137.It now has a 15gb 5400 rpm hardrive and a 60gb 5400 rpm.Is there any problems with adding a 120gb 7200 rpm ? and removing the 15gb....I heard somewhere that older motherboard don't support 7200 rpm drives. Power should not be an issue upgraded to 380 antec.(from 175)...

[maskawaih]

I think it can but why not ask compaq support?

[lynx]

There will be no problem adding a 7200rpm drive to the system, it does not monitor the speed of the drive.

There is a small possibility that the system will not like a drive of that capacity, in which case you would need a bios patch which is the first thing loaded from the drive. Such patches should be available from the drive manufacturer.

Presumably your 15GB drive holds your OS, so you will have to re-install or use something like Ghost or Partition Manager to copy the partition to the new drive. Also be careful with large partitions if you are using Win98 (or even Win95).

[accat13]

I think it can but why not ask compaq support? Ever since HP bought compaq there support sucks..They used to have a very nice user support forum..It went bye bye..And lynx I guess I'll give it a try when I reboot...Nothing really to loose...The os is on the 60gb 5400 rpm,the 15 just holds data...So its only a quick swap....

[tesco]

HP's support is great, atleast in the scanner area it is. I told them that the 3200c scanner software wouldn't install in xp SP2 and they made a new driver for it :)

[Virtualbody1234]

Ever since HP bought compaq there support sucks..They used to have a very nice user support forum..It went bye bye..And lynx I guess I'll give it a try when I reboot...Nothing really to loose...The os is on the 60gb 5400 rpm,the 15 just holds data...So its only a quick swap....
I would recommend that you install the OS on the new faster drive. Use the 60 GB - 5400 RPM for data storage only.

[lynx]

HP's support is great, atleast in the scanner area it is. I told them that the 3200c scanner software wouldn't install in xp SP2 and they made a new driver for it :)
Yes, of course, they did that just for you. Oh, and the thousands of other people who complained about the same thing.

accat13 is right, HP's support sucks compared to Compaq, and for those who can remember that far back Compaq's support sucked compared to Digital. So you can imagine what HP's support is like compared to Digital in the mid 90s. To be honest, it is so poor I sometimes wonder why they bother. When you consider how much extra you pay for their "brand quality" their support is dismal.

[tesco]

Yes, of course, they did that just for you. Oh, and the thousands of other people who complained about the same thing.
They still did it, unlike most other companies. :P

[accat13]

I would recommend that you install the OS on the new faster drive. Use the 60 GB - 5400 RPM for data storage only.Good idea VB thanks

[accat13]

OK I cloned the drive onto the 120gb 7200 rpm drive.Will I notice any difference besides size..ie better dvd burns or anything else..OR will it not really be noticed :unsure:

[lynx]

You may see some speed improvement, depending what it is used for. You will only see faster DVD burns if the old drive was the limiting factor.

The rotational speed won't make that much difference, it has only increased by 33%. One rotation takes 0.139ms instead of 0.185ms, hardly a big difference. But the seek time has improved dramatically. Before it was probably about 10ms average, now it is probably down to 8.5ms. That doesn't sound a lot at first, but it means that the old max seek time was 20ms to cover 15GB, the equivalent of 1.33GB/ms. It is now 17ms to cover 120GB, equivalent to 7.05GB/ms which is over 5 times as fast.

[accat13]

Thanks for the great explanation Lynx....It does seem a little quicker and it is really nice to have the extra space ...