Harddrive upgrade for Mini question

[labrador]

I know this has been discussed before, but I'm still ignorantly unclear as to which tasks upgrading the Mini hardrive to 5400 (or 7200) will show the greatest speed differences (for those of us who bought prior to tomorrow's possible changes I already have 1 g RAM. Will I notice differences in: internet surfing, opening aps, using powerpoint (way too slow), etc. or is it primarily with gaming, which I don't do? Thanks for your expertise. Trying to decide if it's worth the $$$ for me.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Speed improvements from a faster hard drive will be:
- Boot up (minor speed up)
- Opening applications and large data files for the first time
- Virtual memory when you are using more programs and data then will fit in your 1 Gb RAM
- Saving large files
- Working on very large Photoshop, digital video or digital audio projects

It will have little or no impact on games, web browsing, normal applications as long as you keep the total # of open applications below 1 Gb of RAM.
Games are CPU and GPU performance-bound. Yes, every program uses the hard drive, but you have to look where the kinks are in the garden hose -- the weakest link in the chain for that particular application.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[joecool85]

A 5400 rpm wouldn't be worth the bother, but a 7200rpm would definetly let you open apps and run programs that load things all the time like photos (like in PP). In other words, it will help you in everything other than web browsing, that really won't change.