is 10,000 rpm upgrade worth it?

I have the 120gb hard drive with 1gb of memory version with xp. I wanna do some upgrading because the computer is a little slow. I realize it is just a 1.6ghz processor but would like improvements if they are worth the money. Would I see a SIGNIFICANT difference in performance if I upgraded the stock hard drive to a wd velociraptor 2.5" sata 3.0gb/s @ 10,000 rpm and maxed the memory out to 1.5gb (only a 512MB upgrade from where I am at now)? If I only did one of those upgrades which would make give the most impact? thanks for taking the time to read and answer this!

 

I would say no, and its kind of crazy, you know how much power the velociraptor consumes?
but I would consider a 7200rpm hdd though.
But really, it depends on what you like

 

Velociraptor won't work easily. You need +12v power (which laptop drives do not need so it's not standard on laptop connectors internally), and you need to make room for it since it's 15mm and standard laptop drives are 9.5mm in height.

 

10k 2.5" drives are generally server drives. Never seen one in a laptop and I doubt the aspire one could deal with the heat issues.

You can use a 7200rpm drive, but I'm unsure how much of a boost you'd get as I haven't seen any benchmarks on the original drive.

 

I think this might be what you need:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/in ... spx?i=3403

Velociraptor speeds in a solid state drive. It might be a bit pricey, but it sure sounds interesting.

 

62MB/sec on my stock 120GB too slow?

 

Yes. The HDD is the slowest place to get data from so until it stops being that, it will always be "too slow".

 

I like how that article has links to buy completely separate drives on it. One thing to note is that certain drives with certain memory (samsung) and chipsets (I forgot which) stall a lot and will make non linear write/reads (i.e. doing almost any kind of usage) slow.. There's some benchmarks somewhere on anadtech that show wait times in the seconds for data. I can't find it atm, but I don't have time to look.

The intel one, however, works great. Makes me wish I had $700 to blow on a drive.