Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Laptop hard drive... 5400 or 7200 ?

<< < (7/15) > >>

f0dder:
Forget about "interface performance", it's almost 100% irrelevant in real use. You want to pay attention to the actual read/write rates... and again, ignore the burst figures and go by the "long linear transfers".

0.2W and 0.7W differences in power consumption, nothing to lose sleep over imho. The speed differences are also pretty small, I'd go for the seagate since it has lower random access time - you might be able to feel the effect of 3ms there.

Armando:
thanks f0dder.
so what would the "long linear transfers" numbers be? Average write transfer performance ? File writing performance ? none of these ?


PS (for those who'd like these specs too) :

Samsung HM250JI

Drive Transfer Rate   150 MBps (external) / 66.3 MBps (internal)
Seek Time   12 ms (average) / 22 ms (max)
Track-to-Track Seek Time   2 ms
Average Latency   5.6 ms
Spindle Speed   5400 rpm


Seagate ST9160823ASG

Drive Transfer Rate   300 MBps (external) / 59 MBps (internal)
Seek Time   11 ms (average)
Average Latency   4.17 ms
Spindle Speed   7200 rpm

Armando:
(added the price and storage capacity of the beasts to my previous post with the benchmarks -- reply #29)

Darwin:
I currently have a Samsung 120GB 5400 rpm drive installed (HM120JC) and have been very happy with it. Most of my previous 5400 rpm drives have been IBM/Hitachi Travelstars. I like the Samsung drive because it's QUIET - Travelstars are always thrashing... I also like Toshiba drives  :up: Thanks for the link to Tom's Hardware - I'd forgotten about that site. I'll have to check out how my current drive stacks up - I did... OUCH! Time to buy a newer drive...

Like f0dder, though, I'd go for the faster drive... For me, size isn't a huge factor as I already have a 500GB external and by the time I fill that up no doubt we'll be seeing TB notebook drives...

Darwin:
Ooh! And thanks for the link to Microbytes. I've not come across them before and they ship country-wide... Maybe that's not a good thing... This could get me into trouble  :o

EDIT: Maybe not... it looks like I can have any modern drive that I want, as long as I want a SATA drive  :( Best I can do is a first generation 7200 Seagate Momentus but that's not likely to improve much for me beyond the drive I already have!

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page