Why You Need to Change the 5400RPM Hard Drive In Your Laptop

Have you ever wondered why your laptop starts to slow down after a few days or weeks of using it?

How come your laptop is still slow despite that it is powered by an Intel Core i5 or even a Core i7 processor?

How come it is still slow despite upgrading your laptop’s memory to 8GB or even 16GB? The answer lies in your laptop’s hard drive.

Most of the laptops and notebooks sold today are shipped with a 5400RPM hard drive. No matter what capacity or brand it is, as long as it is a 5400RPM hard drive, it will slow down or cause a bottleneck on your laptop. That’s why YOU MUST get an SSD to speed up your laptop.

Lucky for those Ultrabooks or gaming laptops that are built with a solid-state drive, by default, they won’t suffer from this.

For your laptop to run smoothly and as fast as possible, the internal hardware under your laptop’s hood should be at the same level. A fast processor should be paired with a fast/large memory size, and a fast storage drive.

If one of these components is a weakling, then it will cause a bottleneck and you won’t be able to enjoy your laptop’s fullest potential. Soon you will find yourself shouting at your laptop or pounding it until more parts incur physical damage.

The solution to this problem is simple, change, and upgrade your laptop’s 5400 RPM hard drive to a faster one like this.

Recommend – for gaming lover

Get a 7200RPM hard drive, or better yet get a Solid State Drive. Why? I’ll show you the performance difference between these three drives below.

5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM vs SSD

I have an Asus VivoBook S550CM with a third-gen Intel Core i5-3317U processor, 4GB of RAM, with discrete GeForce GT 635M and a 500GB 5400RPM HGST Z5K500-500 hard drive. It’s not much, but I use it regularly for work.

The hard drive of this laptop resulted in an average of 100MB/s read-write speed using CrystalDiskMark, ATTO Disk Benchmark, and HD Tune Pro Benchmark. Below are their respective screenshots.

With that kind of figures (read/write speeds) I oftentimes encounter lags and slowdowns, especially when browsing multiple windows in Firefox (by the hundreds), compressing and decompressing (especially multiple zip files simultaneously), slow loading time in games, rendering large-sized high definition photos in Photoshop and Lightroom, and anything that has something to do with reading/writing in the hard drive.

7200 RPM Hard Drives

I do not have a 2.5-inch 7200 RPM hard drive with me right now, (since I’m planning to save the money and get another SSD). But a 7200RPM hard drive like the WD WD5000BPKX Black is (slightly) faster than a 5400RPM drive.

According to some benchmarks that I saw, the WD Scorpio Black is capable of achieving up to 128MB/s read speed, and around 120MB/s write speed. That is definitely faster than the 5400RPM hard drive that my laptop has.

But that’s not a significant gap when compared to a solid-state drive. Before I’ll show you the benchmark of an SSD, let’s check out a Hybrid Drive first.

UPDATE: HGST has a 2.5-inch 1TB 7200RPM hard drive SATA6GB/s with 32MB Cache. It’s available here.

Solid State Hybrid Drives

A Hybrid Drive or Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) is a type of hard drive that offers SSD-like speed (well not really) at the same time a large capacity than mechanical hard drives offer.

It’s basically a hard drive with a flash chip built in it. One best example of this is the Seagate Solid State Hybrid Drive STBD1000400 7200RPM Solid State Hybrid Drive that comes with an 8GB SLC flash. But soon this will be outperformed by the upcoming WD Black SSHD.

I also don’t have figures for this but an SSHD drive is (slightly) faster than a 7200RPM hard drive. Still, not significantly faster than an SSD.

For the Ultimate Performance Use SSD

Now if you want to really crank up those numbers and significantly increase your read/write speeds, and thus also decreasing your boot-up time and wake up/resume time significantly, then you definitely go for a Solid State Drive.

I currently have a Samsung 840 Pro SSD, it’s not the latest and the fastest SSD out there, but it sure is significantly faster than any hard drive or hybrid drive (even faster than a WD Velociraptor) that the market has to offer.

My Samsung 830 SSD can reach write speeds of up to 320MB/s, and read speeds of up to 450MB/s. And that’s not even the fastest record an SSD can achieve.

Other than blazing speeds that SSDs offer, some models like the Samsung 840 Pro and 840 Evo offers AES hardware encryption, making your data safe and secure, even if it’s stolen.

Hard drives don’t have this kind of technology built-in them, and they usually rely on software-based encryption which is less secured compared to hardware-based encryption. Currently, the fastest SSDs are the Samsung 850 Pro and SanDisk Extreme II.

I know Solid State Drives are insanely fast, but they are also expensive. GB/price is significantly higher compared to a hard drive.

SSDs are expensive, but they offer ultimate performance that is best for your laptop and even desktop PC.

Editor’s Recommendation

There is no question that when it comes to performance, Solid State Drives are the way to go. But what should you buy for your laptop?

If you are going to ask an Enthusiast, they would definitely tell you to buy an SSD. But my answer is simple; just buy what your budget allows you. If you can afford an SSD, then go for it. There are tons of SSDs out there, but I recommend the ones I mentioned above.

A Solid State Hybrid Drive is also a good option, but personally, I wouldn’t invest in this one. I would rather get a WD Scorpio Black 7200 RPM or get an SSD instead. In my own experience, WD drives tend to be more reliable than Seagate’s hard drives.

Oh, there’s another issue concerning SSDs other than their prices. SSDs usually come in smaller storage capacity, unless if you can afford the Samsung 840 EVO 750GB or 1TB.

But if you can’t, an SSD + HDD combination or SSD + External HDD can be a solution to this. There are laptops that come with an extra SATA or mSATA slot. You can use that as secondary storage.

But for those laptops that don’t have a secondary storage option, an external HDD like the WD My Passport Pro or My Passport Ultra would be a partner for the SSD.

Also if you are going for an SSD + HDD / External HDD setup, I would suggest that the SSD would only contain the Operating System and major applications that you use. You may or may not install games on the overflow drive.

Hope this article helps, please don’t forget to share this with your friends and network. Let’s keep people with laptops, or for those who are planning to buy one, well informed.

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