[gorickey]

I am upgrading my TiBook 667 DVI 30 GB 4200 RPM HD to a IBM/Hitachi 40GB/5400 RPM/8MB Buffer drive....those who have this drive in their Powerbook, do you know if their is a considerable performance increase by doing this? Any such issues with this drive that anybody is aware of?

Thanks for any insight/thoughts/suggestions...

[Dr.Michael]

Originally posted by gorickey:
I am upgrading my TiBook 667 DVI 30 GB 4200 RPM HD to a IBM/Hitachi 40GB/5400 RPM/8MB Buffer drive....those who have this drive in their Powerbook, do you know if their is a considerable performance increase by doing this? Any such issues with this drive that anybody is aware of?

Thanks for any insight/thoughts/suggestions...

Hi,

I upgraded to that drive in my Pismo and in my TiBook 500 MHz. Performance increase is more than noticable and with no doubt worth the money. And the drive is very quiet.

But in the meantime there are 7200 RPM drives. Since the harddrive is one of the bottlenecks of a computer it is always good to have one as fast as possible.

Greetings,
Michael

[selowitch]

Originally posted by Dr.Michael:
the harddrive is one of the bottlenecks of a computer it is always good to have one as fast as possible.

How does the rating of the UltraATA interface (66/100/133) affect the speed and performance of the drive. Is it more or less significant than the rotation speed?

[gorickey]

Yeah, the 7200 RPM drives are nice; however, I don't need that much and have a tight budget to play with...thanks for the comments...

[vdrummer]

7200 or 5400 doesn't determine my drive choice; I think first priority in choosing a drive is reliability. I've used many drives over the years, and the worst possible choice is one that's likely to crash, like the two IBM 75Gbs I bought two years ago. I thought they'd be great and they were fast, but both crashed within a year, and although covered under warranty, both replacements crashed quickly too. Ugh! Total Pain ITA. I use http://storagereview.com, and haven't looked there for laptop-size drives, but expect I might upgrade the 60Gb in my TiBook eventually.

[Dr.Michael]

Originally posted by selowitch:
How does the rating of the UltraATA interface (66/100/133) affect the speed and performance of the drive. Is it more or less significant than the rotation speed?

Hi selowitch,

interface speed determines the maximum speed of internal data transfer (for ex. from hd to RAM). 66 MHz Bus speed means 66Mbits/sec at 32 bit bus width = 264 MByte/sec. A 133 MHz bus with 64 bit width would transfer 4 times as much.

Now look into the specs of your harddrives:
An older 4200 RPM disk reads 30 MByte/sec. Your bus is capable of 9 times more transfer rate. So if you insert a faster disk, your overall system will immediately become faster in terms of disk access.
A 7200 RPM disk reads around 65 MByte/sec.

You see, the fastest drive is dog slow compared to the bus and the memory access. Thats what I mean with bottleneck.

In general the RPM is not the interesting data. Interesting is maximum data rate in read/write access. In general faster rotation means faster data rates. But there are also 4200 RPM drives that are as fast as 5400 RPM drives due to higher data density on the surface of the disk.

Does that answer your question?

Michael

[selowitch]

Originally posted by Dr.Michael:
Does that answer your question?

Almost, but what name do you give this technical spec that I should consider when purchasing a new drive? Is it read/write speed?

Thank you for your interesting and thorough reply!

[chabig]

interface speed determines the maximum speed of internal data transfer (for ex. from hd to RAM). 66 MHz Bus speed means 66Mbits/sec at 32 bit bus width = 264 MByte/sec. A 133 MHz bus with 64 bit width would transfer 4 times as much.

These numbers are a not right. The interface speed already quotes the transfer rate in megabytes/second. So an Ultra ATA 66 drive interface can transfer 66 MB/s, Ultra ATA 100 can transfer 100 MB/s, and Ultra ATA 133 can transfer 133 MB/s.

In the future we'll probably achieve transfer rates of 264 MB/s, but we're not close to that now.

Chris

[Dr.Michael]

Originally posted by chabig:
These numbers are a not right. The interface speed already quotes the transfer rate in megabytes/second. So an Ultra ATA 66 drive interface can transfer 66 MB/s, Ultra ATA 100 can transfer 100 MB/s, and Ultra ATA 133 can transfer 133 MB/s.

In the future we'll probably achieve transfer rates of 264 MB/s, but we're not close to that now.

Chris

You misunderstood my intention:

I did not talk about the hd interface. I was talking about the bus. Mabe I shouldn't have used the word interface. You are right, ataxx means xx MB.

But a 66 MHz bus does not transfer 66 MByte. It behaves as explained in my post.

[Dr.Michael]

Originally posted by selowitch:
Almost, but what name do you give this technical spec that I should consider when purchasing a new drive? Is it read/write speed?

Thank you for your interesting and thorough reply!

The specs for Hitachi drives for example specify the

"Max. media transfer rate (Mbits/sec)" and also the "max interface transfer rate" (which is this ataxx number).

The first number determines the data rates and is always smaller than the maximum interface transfer rate.

The data can be found in the technical specs. Look for example here:

http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/5k80/5k80.htm

[gorickey]

Just got done installing this drive in my PB...it was so easy! Anyway, some quick observations are that the drive is very quiet and I can tell a slight difference in very intensive disk usage scenarios...very happy thus far! Oh yeah, the extra space is nice as well...

[chabig]

You misunderstood my intention:

Yep. Looking back I see that I did. Sorry.

Chris