The question is, are the benefits of the higher RPM actually
substantial for notebook drives? In my case, I would say no. My
original 4200 RPM drive seemed to have quite similar performance to
this new 5400 RPM drive. As you noted, though, YMMV. Maybe the Seagate
5400 RPM drive is relatively slow compared to others. I don't know.
Steve
On Apr 6, 2005, at 11:43 AM, Brunel Merleau-Ponty wrote:
On Apr 06 2005, at 15:50, Stephen Jonke wrote:
Another thing to consider is noise and power consumption. Generally
speaking, a 4200 RPM drive is going to use less power (i.e. it's
going to provide longer batter life) and be quieter. Having said
that, power consumption and noise varies by manufacturer and model.
I know off the top of my head that on the Hitachi drives, power
consumption is up 0.5W (peak) for the 5400rpm drives and 1W (peak) for
the 7200rpm drives, which is nothing really - most of the time (i.e.
not reading or writing) they use within 0.2W of each other. I imagine
this is as much down to the electronics (having to power 4x the cache)
as it is the mechanics.
You would see more power saving from turning your screen brightness
down a notch. For comparison, a G4 MPC7447A at 1.4GHz chews it's way
through about 20W - you may think a 400Mhz one will use a lot less,
but not by a lot - the chip's been fabbed on a larger process (0.25 vs
0.13 micron) and lacks all the newer power saving features. So what
I'm trying to say is: you won't notice any change in battery life.
As for noise, it varies so much from disk to disk. I personally hate
'spin' sound, but I actually like to hear the seeks - it provides some
feedback on what the computer's doing. I find my 7200 drive a lot
quieter on seeks than the stock drive, but marginally louder while
idle (I can only just tell it's on though - literally whisper quiet).
YMMV as always, I honestly just think the benefits far outweigh the
negatives.
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