[geeks] Advice on buying a new Mac

[Mark Benson]

On 14 Nov 2006, at 03:11, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:

>> If you get a 7200rpm notebook drive, will it run about as fast as any
>> other 7200rpm drive?
>>
>
> No, if you mean "will it pull data off the disk as fast".  Reason is
> twofold:

I dunno about anyone else, but this threw me a bit.

> 1.  they optimize for ruggedness and low power consumption

Which makes them slower perhaps? They are much more economical anyway  
due to their reduced size, but also I think they have other powersave  
features. IBM Travelstars used to have that annoying tick that  
happened every 2-5mins which was something to do with powersaving,  
and lead to lag picking the heads up again. Smaller platters do  
however reduce inertia meaning if the drive stops to save power it  
spins back up faster.

> 2. the physical drive platter is smaller, thus, even though  
> rotating at
> the same speed, the swept area (whatever the technical term is) is  
> less
> than a larger platter.

Which should increase the speed? Smaller platters = less distance for  
head movement (as stated above) = shorter seek times. If you whip the  
lid off a newer SCSI enterprise drive you will find they a lot use  
2.5" platters in a 3.5" chassis.

All in all a 7200rpm drive should theoretically be faster than it's  
3.5" counter part but in reality the notebook functions probably make  
it slower, but only by a little.

-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://mdblog.68kmac.org>
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