Hi,
I have a Toshiba Satellite m35-s456 with a 4200rpm hd (80G) and I am thinking to get a faster hard drive (7200rpm...). I would like to know if it is possible. Can I have some heat issues, does my bios will support it?...
If it works would you have some advises of types of hd and places I could buy it?
Thanks in advance for your help,
A.

i upgraded my thinkpad from 4200 to 5400. the heat went up 10-15C. the speed difference was barely noticeable, and definitely not enough to justify the upgrade, for what i do on my laptop, at least. so i went back to 4200rpm and have been content with that ever since.

wow... indeed, Thanks for the tip... maybe I should stick with a 4200rpm then...
A.

Personally, I would only consider upgrading a laptop hard drive if I needed more capacity. Many laptops automatically implement a number of powersaving functions in order to extend battery life (dimming the display, stepping down the CPU, etc) and putting in a higher RPM drive would probably (I'm guessing) not make a significant difference, as those powersaving measures may override a higher RPM. Just my 2 cents -- J.W.

Its not the RPM that relates to the speed of the hard drive. It is the accessing time. Notebook or laptop hard drives have an accessing time of 12 ms and more. Hitachi notebook hard drives has accessing times of 9 ms and less. They are faster than any IDE or SATA hard drive. Notebook hard drives that have an RPM of 7200 has much lower power consumption than 4200 RPM hard drives.

This topic is not really Linux related. To the Linux perspective, just about any capacity will work if you keep the /boot partitoin lower than the BIOS limits.

Electro, you say that 7200rpm drives have a lower power consumption than 4200rpm drives, does it mean that I should not worry about possible heating issues? ... with for instance a HItachi 7200rpm of 60G (my hd now is 4200rpm & 80G)...
tks,
A.

I am wrong the 7200 RPM versions uses about a watt more of power on start up. During read and write operations, it uses a 0.5 watts more than 4200 RPM hard drive. The advantage of the 7200 over the 4200 is the accessing time is close to desktop hard drive accessing time. It will give your notebook computer faster performance when accessing files, so you will spend less time waiting for programs to load. There is about 20 g (about four nickels) of additional weight to the notebook when using the 7200 RPM model. Its up to you to decide.