5400rpm vs. 7200 rpm?

beccamalak

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May 3, 2013
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I am currently in the process of replacing my hard drive in my HP Pavilion Dv7 notebook. I am upgrading from 640 MB to 1 TB and am not sure if I want to keep the hard drive at 5400 rpm or upgrade to 7200 rpm. I am mainly concerned about overheating. Please comment about brands as well I have a Toshiba hard drive at the moment and will not be buying another Toshiba for this computer. I was looking at a Seagate.
 
A 7200RPM HDD uses more power than a 5400RPM HDD, so technically it produces more heat. While idling it does not use much power. I generally by Western Digital HDDs where they are internal 3.5" HDDs for desktops or the portable USB 2.5" HDDs.

However, the primary source of heat in a laptop is generated by the CPU (which also has an integrated graphics core) and the discrete graphics chip (if there is one).
 

beccamalak

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May 3, 2013
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10,510


Which brand would you suggest I was looking at Seagate, I also heard that WD Blue failed quite often and that they are a waste of money. I also heard somewhere that WD Black is pretty good so I guess I'm a little confused.
 
I use WD Green, Black and RE (Raid Edition; enterprise/corporation class hard drives) drives. However, those are 3.5" hard drives for desktop PCs.

I don't know about 2.5" laptop hard drives though. I think WD has the Scorpio series.

Out of around 16 WD hard drives over the years, I only had one that gave me problems. It was an old 120GB hard drive (2004??) which developed about 20GB of bad sectors. I didn't loose any data, but at that point I only used it to store temporary data that was not important.