Sorry guys, I hate to bother you all with another one of these horrificly boring computer questions, but I just got a new laptop and I was wondering whether I was going to see a massive reduction in my performance as a result of the drop from a 5200 RPM IDE hard disk to a 4200 RPM SATA disk?

I know that 4200 RPM is not as good obviously, but will the faster interface maybe make up for this? Some have told me it will.

So does anyone know how these two drives would stack up? The advantage of the new laptop is that I have more CPU and RAM which is great and also more onboard HD, but I'm just wondering about the HD speed in the name of audio recording...

Thanks a lot
Kit

Theres practically no difference between SATA and ATA133 INTERFACES at laptop hard drive speeds. However, for some reason I honestly can't explain, often laptop hard drive speeds are completely un-measurable on face value. Last year seagate or maxtor (i forget) released their first laptop hard drive. It was 5400rpm and ATA133, but it was still faster than alot of the SATA 7200rpm drives. However, in general I would say 5400rpm would take the prize over 4200.

Check bench marks for specific models I say

Disk is the biggest bottleneck in most computer systems because it's several orders of magnitude slower than main memory. Various types of caching and read-ahead along with its high bandwidth take care of some of the problem, but a slow disk is still going to be a major factor in a slow system. The beefiest CPU/memory configuration will not alleviate the pain of a poorly-performing drive.

I didn't even realize they still sold 4200 RPM drives. That's pretty bad - you should be looking for at least a 7200 RPM drive, but 5400 at the absolute minimum. The spin speed matters a lot more than the interface speed - usually the interface is not the limiting factor.

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From my experience its completely different: I had a Maxtor IDE133 5400, then put in another Maxtor IDE7200 in my comp. I did not experience any big difference between these 2. Then I got a new Samsung S-ATA (5400RPM) HDD. The new S-ATA was, even though running at lower RPM, much faster in access speed and copying stuff. My conclusion, get S-ATA if possible... I dont know if 4200 is such a good idea though, it is really slow, you wont regret if you spend a little extra money on a HDD with more RPM.

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quote:

Originally posted by cybernetica From my experience its completely different: I had a Maxtor IDE133 5400, then put in another Maxtor IDE7200 in my comp. I did not experience any big difference between these 2. Then I got a new Samsung S-ATA (5400RPM) HDD. The new S-ATA was, even though running at lower RPM, much faster in access speed and copying stuff. My conclusion, get S-ATA if possible... I dont know if 4200 is such a good idea though, it is really slow, you wont regret if you spend a little extra money on a HDD with more RPM.

See, neither SATA or ATA133 would have been hitting max bandwidth at 5400rpm OR 7200rpm (except for cache access maybe - 8mb... lol). Also, the overheads of the interface type aren't so significant that you get a noticeable difference. You can only really conclude that the actual manufacture of the hard drive is the main determinant of laptop hard drive speeds. If you check benchmarks, you will actually see some 5400rpm hard drives performing 25-50% better or more than other 5400rpm drives with the same interface and cache!

quote:

Originally posted by echosystm See, neither SATA or ATA133 would have been hitting max bandwidth at 5400rpm OR 7200rpm (except for cache access maybe - 8mb... lol). Also, the overheads of the interface type aren't so significant that you get a noticeable difference. You can only really conclude that the actual manufacture of the hard drive is the main determinant of laptop hard drive speeds. If you check benchmarks, you will actually see some 5400rpm hard drives performing 25-50% better or more than other 5400rpm drives with the same interface and cache!

Yeah this is more or less what I thought, the bottleneck is at the actual spindle speed. Although manufacture is a significant thing I guess... The only thing I can do is give this new one a go and see I suppose! If it doesn't work, I guess a new drive will maybe be in order... I do have an external glyph 7200 firewire drive for audio recording, but I'm thinking that the system still needs a good rotational speed for stuff like reading DLLs etc right?

quote:

Originally posted by kitphillips Yeah this is more or less what I thought, the bottleneck is at the actual spindle speed. Although manufacture is a significant thing I guess... The only thing I can do is give this new one a go and see I suppose! If it doesn't work, I guess a new drive will maybe be in order... I do have an external glyph 7200 firewire drive for audio recording, but I'm thinking that the system still needs a good rotational speed for stuff like reading DLLs etc right?

Well, to be prefectly honest...

I went from having two 7200rpm 8mb cache drives in raid0 to a single 5400rpm drive on my laptop. I seriously didn't notice any difference for day to day production. The only time you will really notice a significant difference is when youre editing big wav files or working with projects where you have a few entire channels (for the entire song duration) bounced. I do have an external hard drive, but I still only use my laptop hdd for everything.

That said, more IS obviously better. If you start having problems, then move onto something faster. You still need to account the fact that 7200rpm hard drives weren't really designed to go into most laptops and could be really unstable (last time I checked, they put out SHITLOADS of heat!). The general consensus is to keep all your storage external, like what you've already got.

Also, just FYI, I noticed you're a fellow Aussie! In a year or two or whenever you plan on upgrading your laptop, check out Pioneer computers. They're an Aussie distributor that specialise in BTO laptops (you tell them exactly what to put in) and I have found them to be fantastic quality (I own one myself)! Some models ARE very crap though. You need to check what manufacturer they get the motherboards from etc. some of them are budget, some of them are great

quote:

Originally posted by echosystm Well, to be prefectly honest... I went from having two 7200rpm 8mb cache drives in raid0 to a single 5400rpm drive on my laptop. I seriously didn't notice any difference for day to day production. The only time you will really notice a significant difference is when youre editing big wav files or working with projects where you have a few entire channels (for the entire song duration) bounced. I do have an external hard drive, but I still only use my laptop hdd for everything. That said, more IS obviously better. If you start having problems, then move onto something faster. You still need to account the fact that 7200rpm hard drives weren't really designed to go into most laptops and could be really unstable (last time I checked, they put out SHITLOADS of heat!). The general consensus is to keep all your storage external, like what you've already got. Also, just FYI, I noticed you're a fellow Aussie! In a year or two or whenever you plan on upgrading your laptop, check out Pioneer computers. They're an Aussie distributor that specialise in BTO laptops (you tell them exactly what to put in) and I have found them to be fantastic quality (I own one myself)! Some models ARE very crap though. You need to check what manufacturer they get the motherboards from etc. some of them are budget, some of them are great

OK cool, thanks for the tip, will defo remember that when I'm going for a new one! Nice to see a some other Aussies around too!

They still make 4200rpm drives? :\

Hell you could get an external 7200rpm drive for a laptop and it would cost peanuts as long as the capacity wasn't huge. Something around 80gb should be quite affordable.

The drive itself does matter in addition to the rotational speed. When I was searching for 500 gig drives just recently I came across someone who'd benchmarked the top 3 manufacturers (Western Digital, Seagate, and Hitachi I think) and found that the WD performed nearly 20% faster on "sustained" transfers like reading/writing large files. I think it actually performed slightly worse than the other two for random access though. All of these drives had exactly the same specs in terms of cache, RPM, interface, etc.

Having said that, all else being equal you are always better off with a higher RPM, except sometimes on the stupid ultra-portable laptops that can't handle the heat buildup.

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My party schedule:
2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
2009-06-18 - DJ Annoying @ People Need To Know Where I'll Be
2012-11-32 - DJ Insufferable ɸ Or At Least the Stalkers I Complain About
2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here

now that im working with lots of long vocal tracks more im starting too see my HD's limitations. i should of went 7200rpm, but I do need my 500 gigs.

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https://soundcloud.com/ghostea stuff

Yep that's what I've got, a glyph gt050q, I had that before this new laptop, so maybe I'm going to use it a lot more from now on... The irritating thing about that stuff is though, that you wind up with all your sample libraries and session files on there, which would be fine, but then your production system isn't actually portable is it The new laptop is actually a Toshiba p100, how would I find out if it could handle the heat of a 7200 rpm drive, I don't wanna bollocks it all up now