>From what I remember of the pismo, the hard drive is almost always the big bottleneck in performance. While a ram upgrade is the most effective at increasing speed, if a program requires more ram than available, it needs to utilize the hd. However, laptop hd technology is more focused on energy efficiency than speed, especially at that time, so they were not as fast as a desktop drive, even at higher rpms. Laptop drives are also small, and any speed increases are negated as they get filled to capacity. One small way around this was to get a desktop drive and put it in an external drive case, connect it to the firewire port, and keep the internal drive relatively free. Though this reduced portability and increased desk clutter, this allowed me to extend the use of my pismo, until I could afford a TiBook.
On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Bruce Ryan <[email protected]> wrote: > So I thought I'd the '160GB', 5400rpm HD in my Pismo (400MHz, 1GB RAM) > again... > > Whatever, it seems that the faster HD does give a wee speed bump, so I'll > stick with it unless and until I can ever justify the cost of an SSD. > > I'm also intrigued - at what disk access speed does Pismo's bus, processor > or RAM become the limiting speed factor? Once one of these kicks in, there's > no point in increasing disk speeds because the other factors are hard-wired, > as far as I understand it. (Santa didn't give Pismo a processor upgrade this > year.) > > thanks for reading my ramblings > > Bruce -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Books, a group for those using G3 iBooks and PowerBooks (we run a separate list for G4 'Books). The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g-books Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/
