Upgrade while replacing laptop hard drive?

[Rich_S]

The hard drive in my daughter's laptop started throwing up "imminent failure" messages, so I blew most of my weekend figuring out what we needed to replace it, selecting and ordering a drive, backing up the system image, creating a repair disc, etc. Ugh. This of course reminds me that the HD in my own laptop is of similar age, and it's probably a good idea to starting thinking about replacing it before it forces the issue.

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron laptop, a moderately powerful machine in its day, but it's a few years old now. It started with 64-bit Windows 7, but I upgraded to Windows 10 a while back. I use this laptop for general-purpose stuff, and for running Reaper with a Scarlett 2i2 interface. To date, it's mostly audio tracks with minimal plug-ins for basic effects.

This is the original HD that came with it from Dell: SAMSUNG Spinpoint M7E HM321HI 320GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5" Internal Notebook Hard Drive Bare Drive - Newegg.com

It's only a 320 GB drive, but it's presently less than half-full, so capacity is not really an issue. I wouldn't replace it with the exact same model, since it's probably out of production and its price is really high for what it is. The drive I bought for my daughter meets these specs, has more than twice the capacity, and only cost $50.

But as long as I'm replacing it, should I think about improving upon any of the original drive's specs? If so, what would give me the most bang for a few extra bucks? 7200 RPM? Larger cache? SSD? Would any of these improve Reaper's performance, or allow me to work on larger, more complex projects?

 

[Steenamaroo]

Hi there,

Bang for buck? Definitely go 7200. 5400 shouldn't really ever be considered for recording unless you're doing very simple tasks.
Even then, I'd go 7200 because they're so readily available and the price difference usually isn't worth talking about.

I'm sure the point-provers can't wait to line up and tell you otherwise but, really, there's no point buying 5400 drive unless you find a measurable price difference and you're doing really lightweight work like VO or something.


Personally I'd always go SSD because I'm sold on them and I get the full benefit of them.
Whether you'll see a benefit or not really depends on how your setup performs at present. Do you find yourself doing a lot of waiting or is it pretty smooth as is?


If everything's running well and this is purely a pre-emptive strike against failure, I might be more inclined to buy a 1 or 2TB external drive and take full image clones of your laptop and your daughters.
You can update these images once every month or whatever. That way if either drive fails, you always have the FULL OS backed up and ready to restore.

 

[DM60]

I agree with Steen. I would even contend I would push a little harder for the SSD since you will see some performance boost in I/O.