General hard drive question

QUESTION:

So I'd like to put a 7200RPM Hard Drive on my 400MHz G4 PB. Is there really THAT much of a difference between a 5400 and 7200 RPM hard drive?

(Stupid question now

A 7200RPM hard drive won't help speed up browsing the web right? Only RAM will do that, correct?

It will speed up anything that is being written or read from the hdd, so if you are using a lot of Swap space or doing a lot of cache writes, then yes it could, but it is not likely.

Just so you know, it will reduce your battery life.

Answer is yes will make a difference. Here is a link and note the 9.5mm thickness as some drives are 12.5mm. One installed in this link is an Hitachi:-

Hitachi-IBM Travelstar 7K60 7200RPM HD for Powerbook - Mac Forums

The only thing to speed up web browsing is a faster DSL connection. With a G4 find 1500MB/s very fast.

Only thing the 7200rpm disk will do is speed up access to the hard disk. internet speed is based upon many things. Like how much traffic the requested site is seeing? The amount of bandwidth you have available to you? How far away you are from the site? And the less of questions go on.

Someone hopefully will come also and give a few tweeks you can do to your system in order to squeeze out a little more speed.

Well I mean the laptop goes amazingly fast considering it only has 512MB of RAM right now. I'm just kind of dissatisfied with the overall performance of applications I open up on this. Still, I think this is one of the best laptops ever made.

Get yourself more RAM and then you will have less lag and hang ups when you open applications.

Yeah, it helps, but not in some huge dramatic way. But if you care about getting the most out of your machine, spring for a 7200. The hitachis are very nice drives, and don't use hardly any more power. Check out the specs.

Is it worth the extra money? To me, no question. I plan on years of heavy use of my mac, including autocad use on the bootcamp side, where large amounts of data are cached. I had my new hard drive in my macbook within the first week, and never looked back.

It also helps boot time a bit, and with leopard, you can use all the help you can get booting quicker, since it is slower booting than tiger was.