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HD Speed Question

  • 17-04-2006 10:51am
    #1
    red_fox
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 642 ✭✭✭


    Just a quick question, which works out faster, the 5,400rpm hard drive in my laptop or an external USB 2.0 7,200rpm?

    Thanks.


Comments

  • #2
    andy1249
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,403 ✭✭✭andy1249


    If you mean in terms of transferring data to and from your system memory then its definitely the internal 5400 rpm drive , no external drive is fast enough to act as the main system drive , at least not yet anyway .

    This is more to do with the interface that the actual drive , you are limited to a maximum 480 mbps with USB 2 and this is shared with other devices on the chain so no drive will actually ever hit that transfer rate.

    Im not sure of internal transfer speeds for a laptops IDE bus , but its way faster than 480 mbps.


  • #3
    SouperComputer
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 6,949 ✭✭✭SouperComputer


    Your internal drive would be faster, espcially in comparison with USB 2.0. Although if you were transferring a lot of smaller files from many different parts of the drive, the external drive might be faster due to its lower latency.
    Im not sure of internal speeds , but its way faster than 480 mbps.

    Most laptop HD's max out at about 55-60 MB's 480/8=60, so in therory it should be able to match it. However in the real world data does not travel in just one direction with HD's

    Firewire drives are often used to boot operating systems with accptable performance and in rarer cases USB 2.0


  • #4
    zilog_jones
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 6,638 ✭✭✭zilog_jones


    Physically the 7,200RPM drive should be faster, but the USB2 connection may be holding it back because it is limited to 57MB/s (and modern disks can do faster transfer speeds than that), and the USB controller on your laptop may not be good enough to consistantly handle those kind of speeds.

    Also there's a lot of other factors to take into account with hard disks - seek time, cache, the fact that read speed isn't the same speed as write speed, etc.


  • #5
    wingnut
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,942 ✭✭✭wingnut


    The RPM (7,200) does not give you the full picture of the drive speed. It also depends on the cache, number of platters, seek time, sustained transfer rates.

    In theory USB2 is faster then firewire, but in reality the opposite is true. Especailly for video the sustained tranfer reate for firewire is higher:

    http://www.barefeats.com/fire26.html


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