another one for the tech bufs
 

well i need to upgrade the hard drive on my laptop pretty soon, and i found a nice one that spins at 8400 rpms, insted of my 4200 rpms. i was wondering if that would affect the battery life on my laptop. also the new hd comes with 8mb of cache and i figure it's gonna be an improvement over the 2 or 4 mb of cache it has right now. so back to my question: will battery life be affected ?

Most likely yes, the faster drive probably uses more power. However there is the chance that it's a more efficient electrical design and actually uses less, but probably not.

However the faster drive also probably generates quite a bit more heat, so you may want to think about that a little. It can impact the life of the drive and affect the performance of other components if the heat increase is too high.

b

one of my buddies just bought an IBM laptop with a Centrino cpu..
2 identical models were available, the difference being the HD.. Somehow the one with the faster HD had a slighty longer battery life, but the difference was marginal.

Hrm... 8400 RPM? What model is this?

Anyway, with a laptop, a faster HDD generates much more heat, which can cause problems. Also, faster HDDs definitely will eat your batts compared to a slow one, but if you have an old, inefficient drive right now, you might not notice the difference.

It may generate more heat, but as long as you keep your lappy spaced above a flat surface or elevated on like a little stand the heat will dissapate quicker...Works with mine!

Yeah, mine too, but its a real pain in the ass if you're typing in your lap. I wouldn't be worried about it burnin you or anything, just causing instability because of the heat.

Yeah the heat concern is mainly that of stability and data integrity. A HD that isn't cooled sufficiently *will* fail much sooner. You will get bad blocks more frequently, and the drive will become useless much sooner. I don't like to lose data off a HD. :no:

Also too much heat can cause graphic glitches, system hangs (of course MS will take the heat for it even though it's not their fault....bad pun but true), program crashes (again MS will take blame even though it's not their fault), etc.

But whether it adds too much heat depends on how much more the drive creates and how much the system can handle. The drive may only produce negligible heat over the current drive. No telling....

b