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    It's driving me up the wall...

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by arete, Sep 12, 2006.

  1. arete

    arete Newbie

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    Apologies for the rubbish pun :)

    With the help of this fantastic forum I've bought this laptop: http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=450X&CategorySelectedId=11105&NavigationKey=11105,50600&v=2#infoarea

    I have an 80GB 7,200rpm HD from my dead desktop which I'm going to stick in a caddy. I'm kind of anal about organising where programmes and files are stored to maximise speed and really dislike a sluggish response.

    I'm not going to be gaming but doing a lot of Office work, internet, some Photoshopping and encoding and listening/watching lots of mp3s and DVDs. What would be the best way of organising which files I put on which disk? Will I notice a difference in speed between the internal 80GB SATA 5,400rpm and the external 80GB IDE 7,200rpm in real world use? With the Core Duo on my laptop where do you think the system bottleneck will be - the RAM or the harddive?
    Cheers.
     
    arete, Sep 12, 2006
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  2. Thaenatos

    Thaenatos Zero Cool

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    yes a slight difference. Not only is ide alot slower then SATA, but transfering over USB doesnt help. But I would still use it as a file storage drive.
     
    Thaenatos, Sep 12, 2006
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  3. arete

    arete Newbie

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    So sticking all the media files on the external would make more sense. I had thought that the internal would be slower as 5,400 but the SATA will mean it's quicker? Cheers
     
    arete, Sep 12, 2006
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  4. Thaenatos

    Thaenatos Zero Cool

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    Yeah it will be. Infact writing to an internal 5400 ide(ata6) will be faster then a 7200rpm ide over usb. The internal drive will always be faster, unless your using a really old laptop or you have an external SATA drive. But I dont think those have made it to laptops for the most part.

    Just because the internal drive is faster, doesnt make the drive useless. Like you said it would still make sense to use the drive for storage, no matter what the storage may be.
     
    Thaenatos, Sep 12, 2006
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  5. TwilightVampire

    TwilightVampire Notebook Deity

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    Laptop SATA is unforutenetly somewhat hosed. Its slower than its desktop counterpart. It still offers huge burst rates though. I think performance of the external USB drive would be better. I performed tests on my internal 80GB 5400RPM SATA drive and my external 7200RPM drive hooked into the USB. I used the HD Tune utility. Heres what I got:

    Internal drive: Monitoring graph was up and down like crazy and there was a drastic dropoff in performance as the test went on.

    Transfer Rates
    Minimum: 2.9mb/s
    Maximum: 33.5mb/s
    Average: 25.4mb/s

    Access time: 21ms

    Burst Rate: 71.4mb/s

    External drive: Monitoring graph was very steady.
    Transfer Rates
    Minimum: 22.4mb/s
    Maximum: 22.9mb/s
    Average: 22.6mb/s

    Access time: 13.8ms

    Burst Rate: 21.7mb/s
     

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    TwilightVampire, Sep 12, 2006
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