Everybody change your drive to 7200 rpm NOW

andersanders
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
So I needed to change the HD in my iBook. The old one was fried.



I figured I should go all the way and put a 7200 drive in it and I made it 100 gb, mostly for the extra speed (denser information * speed = teh elite transfer speeds).



I ccc´ed the 80 gb 4200 rpm HD on my mini, installed it and . My iBook is a 800 mhz and themini is 1.42 Ghz but the iBook feels MUCH MUCH faster, especially switching between apps. I am very dissapointed with the Dashboard speeds on my mini. With the new hd in the iBook it is updated instantly.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    xoolxool Posts: 2,460member
    How much ram do you have?



    Switching between apps should be severely impacted by drive speeds unless you're constantly hitting virtual memory.



    That said, when I upgraded my drive in my G5 tower I immediately noticed a speedup too, so some of what you're experiencing is real.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    andersanders Posts: 6,523member
    Both have 512 mb but I don´t tax them that hard. Safari, mail and one Office program at the time. So it should have enough ram.



    But it is definetly paging (activating and deactivating with two minutes interval goes a lot faster than with 15 minutes between)
  • Reply 3 of 7
    xoolxool Posts: 2,460member
    1 GB is weak sauce. 512 MB is uber-weak-little-girl sauce.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    gene cleangene clean Posts: 3,481member
    Use an external FireWire HD as bootdrive on our mini. You'll see the difference right away.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    sandausandau Posts: 1,230member
    How much did your battery life decrease?
  • Reply 6 of 7
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    Tests (including my own) do show that a 7200 rpm drive can give you as much as a 50% boost in performance for tasks that use the hard drive over a 5400 rpm. Things like Photoshop respond well to faster HDs.



    You would see a big difference between 4200 and 7200. My Mini has a 5400 and although it did feel slightly more responsive with an external 7200, I wouldn't run it off an external drive. mainly because I use my external drive as a backup.



    I agree with xool, switching apps shouldn't really be affected by drive speed. I would try deleting your system caches. Then I would go for 1GB Ram. Of course, I really wouldn't like to be stuck using a 4200 drive anyway and given that I've just purchased a really nifty Lacie Porshe 80GB 7200 FW drive for £75, I'd probably go with the external boot idea just to see what it does.



    I hate having to buy 2.5" drives, especially fast ones because they are so expensive.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    andersanders Posts: 6,523member
    The two system are very alike (the mini basically being an iBook without a screen) with the same amount of ram and I run the same basic apps on both. The only difference is the speed of the CPU, the speed of the drive and the size of the screen (I use a 20 inch cinema display for the mini). The content of the drives are the same, since I ccc´ed the content of the Mini to the iBook. Of course it gets defragmented when transferred (and the Minis drive is at 80%) but still: Even compared to the last time I used the original drive in the iBook, which also was ccc´ed from the mini, the difference is huge.



    Battery time: Its rather poor but its hard to compare, since I haven´t treated the battery very nice the last 12 month and it is getting old.
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