The hard drive in the wife's laptop bit the dust. It was a Hatachi 320GB 7200rpm. I was thinking about replacing it w/ this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-SEAGATE-320-GB-2-5-SATA-7200-RPM-LAPTOP-HARD-DRIVE-/180675739097?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2a111cfdd9#ht_1325wt_1139

Or should I look for something else? Do hard drives have actual features I should be looking for?

6/4/2011 7:29:04 PM

http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?sduid=79849&t=2987915

6/4/2011 7:42:53 PM

Quote :

"Or should I look for something else? Do hard drives have actual features I should be looking for?"

For the average user, storage space is pretty much the only factor.

For more technically inclined users, lower speed drives are slightly cheaper (5400, 7200, 10k RPM), but it takes longer to read and write data. In addition, hard drives suffer from seek time and access time (or latency), measured in ms; the lower the faster. There's also a cache size, but I've never seen it make a difference.

Lastly, as a user, you can affect how the disk performs by partitioning and defragmenting.

6/4/2011 9:21:13 PM

In my experience, the rotational speed of the drive can make a HUGE difference in the effective performance of the system. I have used computers with 5400RPM hard disks that were otherwise considerably more powerful than my laptop (with a 7200RPM hard disk), but my laptop was still faster at real-world tasks like booting up or launching Firefox.

6/4/2011 11:26:35 PM