Upgrading Your Notebook Hard Drive: Does It Make Sense?

Benchmark Results: SYSmark 2007 Preview

We decided to run SYSmark 2007 to get a better impression on the performance differences between the aged Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 and the new 7K500.

The e-learning test runs Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Macromedia Flash, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Apparently, there is a measurable throughput increase when using the newer drive.

The productivity benchmark of SYSmark 2007 is based on MS Office applications, MS Project, and WinZip 10.0. It benefits from the faster drive, but not in any meaningful way.

The overall SYSmark 2007 rating is considerably higher for the system running the newer Travelstar 7K500 versus the Travelstar 7K200. Clearly, the new drive makes sense here, mainly because of its positive impact in the video creation test.