[solagratia1600]

Hi all,

recently I installed an internal Western Digital 120gb/7200rpm of HD into my 466mhz power mac, and found a significant boost in speed. I did a rendering test using a Maya file, comparing the Titanium PBook 550mhz/512ram to the 466mhz/384ram. The Titanium rendered only slightly faster than the Power Mac. Before I switched the drive in the Power Mac to the 7200rpm WD, it was using a 5400rpm IBM drive. When it was using the old drive, there was a slower rendering time compared to the Titanium. The Titanium PB ran on a 4200rpm rate. I think the bus speed is the same.

This discovery led me to another thought. If we hook up an external drive as a boot and main HD through Firewire 800 with a 7200rpm spec, will this give a significant boost as well to the speed of a powerbook like the 17inch?

Does the external Firewire drive works equally as fast compared to the internal hard drive?

I was thinking what's the best way to speed up the powerbook's speed for an intensive task like 3d rendering. Besides getting plenty of ram, the only other way is to upgrade the drive. Assassyn pointed out before in another discussion thread that internal HD upgrade to a faster rpm may not be compatible with the powerbook's performance issue. (eg. heat, battery life etc)

thanks.

[bwilliams4]

I have a 17" PB and hooked it up to a Lacie 400 Gig firewire 800 drive today. It is very fast. I do not have numbers to prove it but it seemed much faster than my internal. I work for a reseller and the product manager told me that it should be quite a bit faster than the internal and it certainly seemed to be. expample: I copied 860 Mb from my internal to the 800 drive in about 45 seconds. This does not really indicate the speed of the 800 but it can give you an idea of the transfer speeds.

Bob

[solagratia1600]

Hi Bob,

thanks for your response. In the possible case that I described, I am wondering how fast the firewire external drive will be, not only as a storage drive, but as an alternative boot and main drive for the 17inch powerbook. I wonder whether there is a difference in speed when it comes to file transfer comparing to task processing/performance with the external drive.

[CatOne]

Yes, the machine will boot faster from the 7200 8 MB cache external drive. And everything that hits disk (launching apps, etc.) will be faster, too.

Of course it's not super convenient if you wanna move the computer around ;-)

[solagratia1600]

Pardon me for bringing this further,

am I right in saying that the overall performance are boosted, not only because of the Firewire800 broader pipe, but all because the higher rpm drive will compute tasks at a faster speed, not only with booting, launching apps, but also performing tasks such as 3d rendering or movie output?

yes, its not as convenient, if the powerbook and the external hard drive are moved around. Though, it offers some flexibility, when it comes to rendering, the external drive is a good alternative boot/performance drive for the job, better than the internal drive.

Originally posted by CatOne:
Yes, the machine will boot faster from the 7200 8 MB cache external drive. And everything that hits disk (launching apps, etc.) will be faster, too.

Of course it's not super convenient if you wanna move the computer around ;-)

[MacNStein]

Yes, that is correct, overall speed will improve regardless of whether it's FW 800 or 400. The higher spindle rate (and larger cache) makes a huge difference. FW 800 isn't 2x faster than 400. In real world testing it's about 30% quicker in some areas, there are still many other restrictions to performace involved and the vast majority of operations don't even saturate a 400 Mb bus. At least that's been my observation.

[cambro]

There's no doubt that one of the most significant bottle-necks in any laptop today is the hard drive. I'm very, very surprised that more technological advances have not been made on this front.

Speed on just about every aspect of use would be greatly improved by some wicked hard drive/storage technology push.

[SEkker]

xlr8yourmac.com has a posting on speeds with external FW800 drives. I came to the same conclusion: these external drives are full replacements for our slow notebook internal drives.

I may buy one just to use for video editing sessions -- get both lots of extra storage, and a nice speed boost when you really need it. After all, I tend to be tethered during my video editing sessions anyway.