On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 11:34 PM, Kasey Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > I would go with the 7200RPM, going from a 5400 to a 7200 even with an > IDE drive is a big difference.
It used to make a bigger difference than it does now with the newer, higher bit density platters. This article might be of interest: "Should You Be Looking For A Hard Drive Upgrade?" Tom's Hardware - 2009-08-19 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hard-drive-upgrade,2377.html The article compares the performance of an older and a newer Samsung drive. The new one is a 1TB Samsung F2 which I expect is equivalent to the 5400RPM F2 you're looking at. Here's an excerpt: "The F2 EcoGreen drives comes with 32 MB cache memory, which is four times more than the SP2004C. But it <the F2> spins at only 5,400 RPM. This isn’t a reason to be scared in the performance area, though, as this drive still delivers 107 MB/s and hence provides almost twice the throughput of the 3-4 year old P120 drive." Clearly ~100 MB/s ain't too shabby. It still won't be limited by your 1.5Gbps theoretical max SATA bandwidth (~185 MB/s??). Other aspects of your system ... like your CPU performance and max memory transfer rate ... will probably hold it back more. While you might possibly get a bit better performance by going with a 7200 RPM drive, I don't think with your system you'd really see a noticeable performance improvement from the extra rotational speed. You might also take a look at the site http://diskcompare.com. The site appears to be pretty an indirect way for newegg.com to try to sell more hard drives. But if you keep that bias in mind, it can still be a useful way to locate recent hard drive reviews from the various hardware sites on the Internet. -irrational john -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
