[nickw311]

Someone in the thread about replacing a MacBook HD with a 7200rpm HD said that the performance benefits were minimal. It got me wondering if anyone has run or seen any benchmarks comparing the two.

Here is the original thread:
http://forums.macnn.com/66/macbook-a...ng-macbook-hd/

[mduell]

Depends what you're doing... for bulk transfers you won't see a difference, but for I/O (reading/writing lots of small files and 'jumping around' the disk) bound usage you will. Here are some comparison benchmarks for the fastest laptop drives available.

Buy a solid state (flash) drive if you really need speed (I/O and bulk transfers).

[MacNNUK]

I actually found that USB flash drive was slower than burning to CD or DVD !

SImilarly for external HDD

[mduell]

Originally Posted by MacNNUK 

I actually found that USB flash drive was slower than burning to CD or DVD !

SImilarly for external HDD

SSD is flash connected via SATA, not USB.

But an external HDD should be faster than CD/DVD.

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by nickw311 

Someone in the thread about replacing a MacBook HD with a 7200rpm HD said that the performance benefits were minimal. It got me wondering if anyone has run or seen any benchmarks comparing the two.

I can't talk from personal experience with laptop drives, but I upgraded my iMac G3's drive from the stock 5,400RPM drive to a 7,200RPM drive, and there was a definite (albeit slight) performance boost in day-to-day use. I suspect you'd get a similar boost in moving to a 7,200RPM drive.

Originally Posted by mduell 

Buy a solid state (flash) drive if you really need speed (I/O and bulk transfers).

Unfortunately, they're horrifically expensive just now; in a couple of years, I imagine they'll be affordable. Once they are, I'll be popping one inside my Cube to further decrease the (already negligible) sound foot-print.

Originally Posted by MacNNUK 

I actually found that USB flash drive was slower than burning to CD or DVD !

SImilarly for external HDD

The USB is acting as a bottle-neck in this case; the average read/write rates of even USB2.0 are far lower than either PATA or SATA. USB2.0 has a peal transfer speed of 480MB/s, but its sustained transfer rate is much lower; on top of that, Apple's implementation of USB is poorer than Microsoft's implementation under Windows.

With external hard-drives, the consensus around here is stick to FireWire; overall, the performance is much better than USB's.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Koralatov 

Unfortunately, they're horrifically expensive just now; in a couple of years, I imagine they'll be affordable. Once they are, I'll be popping one inside my Cube to further decrease the (already negligible) sound foot-print.

At 32GB for $300 it's not that bad now for people who need the performance... but for people who are just looking for the noise improvement they are still pretty expensive.

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by mduell 

At 32GB for $300 it's not that bad now for people who need the performance... but for people who are just looking for the noise improvement they are still pretty expensive.

That's definitely getting there, but it's still way too rich for my tastes. When I can get 64GB for about £100, then I'll bite. Until then, sadly I'll have to hold off...

[ixus_123]

Also worth considering the cache on some of these disks - newer ones are coming with 16mb which is bound to make a difference

[mduell]

Originally Posted by ixus_123 

Also worth considering the cache on some of these disks - newer ones are coming with 16mb which is bound to make a difference

It will make a difference for small writes, but it's not really a big deal.