I'd have to look at the benchmarks, but I'd worry more about the bus speed
for USB 2 vs internal IDE rather than the RPM of the drive. What I've heard
is that once you get up to 100 or 120 GB drives, the data density is so high
that getting a 7200 RPM drive doesn't improve the benchmarks more than a few
percent. So an internal 120GB 5400RPM drive should be fine for most media
applications. I can't remember what the duplexed throughput on a USB 2
drive is, but I'd guess that your bottleneck will be there, rather than the
drive itself. Personally, unless being able to easily move it from one
computer to another is an issue, I'd go with an internal.
As for partitioning, you will waste space to a certain extent on one large
partition. But what the heck? You can get 120GB drives for $100-150 if you
shop, and the time and annoyance you'll save is probably worth the handful
of megabytes you'll lose. And, really, it's small files that are most
wasteful. If you have a 16K cluster size, a 3-byte file will still store as
if it were 16K. However, a 500MB file still only wastes up to 16K.
--Ben Doom
Programmer & General Lackey
Moonbow Software
<snip>
: As a follow up - if the primary purpose of the drive is for media - does
: it need to be 7200 RPM or is 52(or 54 - I forget which)00 acceptible? I
: believe my current drive is a 5200 rpm, and it works just fine for me.
</snip>
<snip>
: > I'm about to pick up one of those nice external-put an internal drive
: > inside usb 2 frames w/a 120 gig hard drive. Since the primary
: > purpose of
: > this drive will be for media - I would like it to be one drive, not
: > multiple. In the past, I know it was important to partition
: > large drives
: > into smaller ones because space would be wasted otherwise. Is
: > that still
: > true?
</snip>
______________________________________________________________________
Signup for the Fusion Authority news alert and keep up with the latest news in
ColdFusion and related topics. http://www.fusionauthority.com/signup.cfm
Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
