[stevekstevek]

Originally posted by ctishue21:
How is your battery life reading? Oh and does system profiler confirm this is the Hitachi 5400rpm 80GB?

At the moment, I don't have a battery life indicator, because I'm installing another Operating System that isn't Jaguar, and there's no indicator in the installer

But, system profiler and the "disk tool" did say it's Hitachi, and it is 81GB (70-something GiB), and there's at least one 5 in the long model number .

[wavegroom]

Originally posted by stevekstevek:
OK, here's the Xbench results for the 5400 rpm drive:


Disk Test: 77.39
sequential
4k write: 93.10 37.06MB/s
256k write: 81.08 31.65MB/s
4k read: 134.11 21.23MB/s
256k read: 78.63 31.77MB/s
random
4k write: 57.24 0.82MB/s
256k write: 67.71 15.27MB/s
4k read: 68.81 0.45MB/s
256k read: 75.62 15.56MB/s

Thanks man! finally some specs!
I thinking I've done the right thing to order the 5400 Drive....
My Order is still at status 1 "being reviewed" grrrrr, but my waterfield bag arrived today :-)

so whats up with the access time of the 5400 drive? have you some benchmarks?

[stevekstevek]

Originally posted by wavegroom:
Thanks man! finally some specs!
I thinking I've done the right thing to order the 5400 Drive....
My Order is still at status 1 "being reviewed" grrrrr, but my waterfield bag arrived today :-)

so whats up with the access time of the 5400 drive? have you some benchmarks?

The sequential read/write scores should give you a good real-world test of the access time; it includes the track seek time, as well as the access latency, plus the read/write speed. (i.e. for each chunk read, the head needs to seek, then you need to wait till the part of the disc comes under the head, and then you need to read the block. The actual reading/writing time is probably the shortest part of the test.

I don't know what to use to get raw seek time testing; I'm not sure you can get that from within the O/S layers..

[C-Bear]

Originally posted by stevekstevek:
http://barefeats.com/al15.html says:

We haven't tested the optional 5400rpm 80GB drive yet but we will soon. I did run Xbench 1.1.1 drive test on the stock Fujitsu 4200rpm 80GB (2MB cache). It measured 26MB/s sustained read/write (256K blocks).

So, the 5400 rpm drive got me 31MB/s with 256kB blocks; that's 20% faster.

I'm surpised this post hasn't garnered more attention � seems that several of us have been going back and forth on the 4200 versus 5400 choice (I still can't decide).

Can anyone comment on these benchmarks for the non-technical among us (), how applicable they are in real-world terms (and for average users as opposed to those who'll be pushing the limits), and if this makes the $125 cost worth it?

Also, barefeats mentions a 2MB cache on the 80GB 4200 drive, did we confirm that this is an error and that the 4200's DO have an 8MB cache?

Some definitive word on this HD issue would really be nice�

[Bruck]

i'd like to see definintive info. I ordered mine with the 5400, cause i'd rather be safe than sorry. I look at it this way. Every day it seems someone upgrades to the 7200rpm drive and says WOW ITS INCREDIBLY FASTER. So i figure that the 5400 should be faster, maybe not as much but 20% could make a difference. And since the 7200 rpm drive voids warrenty, i'd rather have an apple sanctioned 5400 drive and my warrenty in tact. So i bought the 5400rpm drive.

p.s. why would they sell it if it didnt improve performance? (this may be a stupid & nieve question)

[nagromme]

More info on battery life (is it really virtually the same?) and noise would be good, too. Heat as well, but that's never bothered me much.

(And they'd sell it because people have demanded it--which doesn't always mean they should have!)

[chrisutley]

I thought hard drives were user installable parts on PowerBooks, and as a result not something you can void your warranty doing. If your manual includes instructions on how to do it, chances are it's not a warranty violation.

[nagromme]

HDs used to be officially user-installable. Not a warranty issue.

But that has apparently changed. Maybe the new PBooks are just packed too tight to trust us?