MacBook Pro HD speed question

[Messiah]

Okay, so I've just tested two MacBook Pro Core Duo laptops with Xbench, and it returned some unexpected results...

The 15" MBP, which has an upgraded 7200rpm HDD mechanism, appears to be slower (lower score) than the 17" MBPs 5400rpm mechansim.

The 15" has a 1.83GHz CPU, and the 17" a 2.16GHz CPU, but I'm unsure if this would make any difference to the HDD scores?

Can this be right, or is Xbench inaccurate?

Cheers...

[smax]

Drive speed is not the only thing that determines exctly how fast a drive is. Platter density is a big factor too.

Let me guess: the 17" has a higher capacity than the 15"?

[Messiah]

Drive speed is not the only thing that determines exctly how fast a drive is. Platter density is a big factor too.

Let me guess: the 17" has a higher capacity than the 15"?

Yup! The 15" is a 100GB, and the 17" is a 120GB.

[Messiah]

So would the 200GB, 4200rpm drive be faster still?

[smax]

That is the milion dollar question... but everyone seems too turned off by the fact that it's only 4200 RPM. What they don't realize that there MIGHT be less power consumption because of the slower rotational speed and it would probably be faster than, say, a 120GB 5400 RPM drive. The seek times will be longer though. I have no idea what exactly is faster than what though, and I'm not about to shell out hundreds of dollars to benchmark a bunch of different hard drives.

Why do people have to be hatin' the 4200 RPM drives?

[cardiacdave]

here's results for the 200GB drive for ya, on a MBP 2.33 w/2gig of ram.

Disk Test 34.13
Sequential 46.39
Uncached Write 64.93 39.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 43.29 24.49 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 29.85 8.74 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 70.27 35.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 27.00
Uncached Write 10.12 1.07 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 58.09 18.60 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 51.19 0.36 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 79.33 14.72 MB/sec [256K blocks]