Laptop HDD upgrade

[Deftonesmev]

About 4 months ago I bought an Acer Aspire 5520: AMD Turion 64 TL-60 Dual Core at 2.0 Ghz, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS, 2 GB RAM, 160GB HDD. Since then I bought an extra 2 GB of RAM and now I was thinking of buying a new hard drive. But I'm puzzled about some things and I need some help. I came across 2 hard drives that seem pretty good and aren't that expensive:

first one: http://www.pcgarage.ro/hdd-notebook/western-digital/250gb-sata-ii-7200-rpm-16-mb-scorpio-black/

second: http://www.pcgarage.ro/hdd-notebook/western-digital/500gb-sata-ii-5400-rpm-8mb-scorpio-blue/

(the site is in romanian but the specifications on both hard drives are visible)

Anyway, I can't decide between these 2 because of the following reasons:
1) My current hard drive is a SATA one and these two are on SATA-II. What I've read over the internet and talked to people about, the only difference between is the transfer speed and not the connection itself. True ?
2) The thing is that the 320GB one has a higher buffer rate and better RPM. But the other one has 500GB. Quality or quantity ?

Please help ..

[Paul Komski]

The connections are the same with 1.5 and 3.0 speed drives. If the host controller firmware does not support 3.0 speed the drives can be jumpered to operate at the slower 1.5 maximum access speeds.

If you want or need the extra storage obviously get the larger drive but for performance:- RPM makes a big difference; bigger buffer, in my experience, a small difference.

[Deftonesmev]

So I should go for the 320GB then ? My current 160GB has 5400 RPM also and sometimes I wish it could go faster:mad:

[Sylvander]

1. Do you need to carry around an internal HDD with huge storage capacity?

(a) I'd be inclined to have a [small] FAST internal HDD to hold the Operating System and Programs on partitions that are only just big enough to take the necessities [plus a sensible amount of spare space].

(b) And store [pretty near all] data files on one or more external [USB 2.0?] HDD's.
You could use a small amount of internal storage, on a separate data partition, on the internal HDD...
For important or currently used data files, or files you need to take with you on the move...
That you'd move to external storage when the time is right.

(c) You could buy a new, [smallish?] FAST HDD as your new internal HDD, and fit your older HDD into an external enclosure.

2.
(a) If you wanted REALLY FAST operation of the Operating System...
You could use [some puplet of] a distro of Puppy Linux.
It runs so FAST because it loads totally into ram, and once there doesn't need to fetch anything from storage to run anything.
Everything is really zippy; faster than big bloated OS's like Windows on any given hardware.
And because it's practically immune to infection...
There's no need to run all those programs in the background to check for possible malicious activity.

(b) The speed of loading a Puppy varies very slightly depending on what it's being loaded from, but there's not really a lot of difference.

e.g.
(c) Loading from a HDD Linux partition is FAST, but GRUB slows things down by some seconds I notice.

(d) Loading from a Flash Drive would be fast...
But in my case it isn't because my PC's BIOS cannot boot USB, so I used Puppy to make a "WakePup2" bootable floppy, which loads the OS from the Flash Drive.
But the floppy is slow, which slows down the whole operation.
If your machine can boot USB it will be fast methinks.

(e) Loading from a bootable "live" optical disk [DVD or CD] is pretty fast, and has much to recommend it.
No GRUB bootloader involved, so no delay there.
The main boot files [along with the "pup_save" file] can be saved to the root folder of a partition on the internal HDD...
So the boot is only initiated by the optical disk, and the files load FAST from the internal HDD.
So it's probably as fast as a conventional install to an internal [Linux] partition.

[Deftonesmev]

Thank you all for your answers, I'll buy the fast HDD. Thank you again :)