[Thinkpad] Disk speeds

> From: richard <rpritz@rcn.com>

> At 06:47 PM 1/23/2004 -0500, James H. E. Maugham wrote:
> >richard [mailto:rpritz@rcn.com] wrote:
> >
> > > Seriously though, I'll definitely notice another 20gb of
> capacity. Would
> > > one really notice 1800 additional rpm?

> >I replaced the 5400RPM 40GB HD that came in my T40 with a 7K60
> and noticed an
> >improvement in performance.
> >
> >I replaced the 5400RPM 40GNX in my 600X with a 7K60 and it was like a new
> >machine!
>
> My 1ghz office desktop was replaced with a 1.7ghz. It was a new machine,
> but I couldn't tell the difference.

OK. here are some specs. The 5k80 specs at 450mbps maximum transfer rate,
12ms average seek and 5.5ms average latency, while the 7k60 specs at
518mbps, 10ms and 4.2ms.

If you're doing a straight disk read of a large file, the faster drive could
be 15% faster.

If you're doing database with essentially random tasks, (hmmm.... 12+5.5+0
versus 10+4.2+0) depending on how one does the math, the new drive could do
23% more operations per unit time. I'd say that's very noticeable.

But man, if you're going at a full rate of over 50MB/s, you're taking a good
chunk of memory bandwidth. I'd say if you've got a very old machine with
PC66 memory (and a very slow CPU to go with that), then you won't notice the
disk speed increase much... but then I wouldn't be putting either of these
drives in such an old machine.

Chris

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Received on Sat Jan 24 01:29:06 2004