How critical is H/D speed to processing ?

gus

Just looking at more laptops & a bloke today told me not to worry about going for a 7200 rpm as they really chew laptop battery power & that a 5400 rpm will do fine matched with a 2 gig centrino & 2 gig ram.

Power does not worry me that much but is it possible to explain how much slower/faster one is to the other ?

I mean are we talking playing Doom3 at 67 fps verses 64 fps sort of speed or is it significant.

No its not for games...just using that to get my question across.

Andy

Humungus wrote:

Just looking at more laptops & a bloke today told me not to worry about going for a 7200 rpm as they really chew laptop battery power & that a 5400 rpm will do fine matched with a 2 gig centrino & 2 gig ram.

Power does not worry me that much but is it possible to explain how much slower/faster one is to the other ?

I mean are we talking playing Doom3 at 67 fps verses 64 fps sort of speed or is it significant.

No its not for games...just using that to get my question across.

most folks wouldn't see the difference. yeah games want the fast drives, so do heavy heavy photshoppers. i don't use my laptop full-time so i've never given it a second thought - but pshop and games etc are also disk-intensive so a fine-tuned sort may notice the difference. my guess is that on fri/sat nights, you won't

gus

Ta mate...im assuming that doubling my whole computer power over my desktop processor/RAM wise will keep me happy & RPM wont be a big issue.

dragon300zx

*Cough*Moron*Cough*

Thats what I woulda done when the guy said that. Does it eat up battery, Yeah it does. Are there work arounds, external batteries, things to make up for that, Yes there are.

Does The hard drive speed really make that big of a difference. YES IT DOES. Unless your running 2-4gb of ram it will make a huge difference. There is a noticable difference to the geek in the lag time between the two drives. I would most deffinatley go with the faster hard drive. Why get a fast processor, alot of fast ram, and then go and bottle neck your system at the hard drive. Thats like driving down a four lane highway in the middle of rush hour, and having it change to one lane.

HeldDown

You won't miss the extra speed. For once, a salesman wasn't just lying -- 7200rpm drives do a number on laptop batteries. Like Andy, I do a lot of editing on my laptop (1.6, 768 megs of ram, 80g 5400rpm drive) and don't notice the difference most times to my faster hdds in the desktop at home.
If you're concerned, however, about overal PS speed, you should definetely invest in a RAM upgrade -- stuff it with as much ram as you can. RAM uses minimal current as there are no moving parts, and it is really the critical link to worry about between the processor and the harddrives. In reality, PS dumps most of its current work to RAM anyways, and doesn't really touch the HDDs unless it runs out... that's when it gets slow, no matter HOW fast your HDD is. So, in conclusion, get a slower HDD, but more RAM!

EDIT: Just noticed you said TWO gigs of ram. Don't worry about it then!

dragon300zx

HeldDown wrote:

You won't miss the extra speed. For once, a salesman wasn't just lying -- 7200rpm drives do a number on laptop batteries. Like Andy, I do a lot of editing on my laptop (1.6, 768 megs of ram, 80g 5400rpm drive) and don't notice the difference most times to my faster hdds in the desktop at home.
If you're concerned, however, about overal PS speed, you should definetely invest in a RAM upgrade -- stuff it with as much ram as you can. RAM uses minimal current as there are no moving parts, and it is really the critical link to worry about between the processor and the harddrives. In reality, PS dumps most of its current work to RAM anyways, and doesn't really touch the HDDs unless it runs out... that's when it gets slow, no matter HOW fast your HDD is. So, in conclusion, get a slower HDD, but more RAM!

EDIT: Just noticed you said TWO gigs of ram. Don't worry about it then!

Argh I guess I'm just super critical about speed then. However when you first open your files you open them directly off the hdd this is where lag is most noticable. Also ifyou are a heavy user and into gaming, or editing tons of photos while doing other stuff you will notice it.

Andy

HeldDown wrote:

You won't miss the extra speed. For once, a salesman wasn't just lying -- 7200rpm drives do a number on laptop batteries.

interestingly, apple just released new versions of their powerbooks and they claim longer batterylife even with the 7200 rpm disks ....

ScottMcLeod

andy wrote:

interestingly, apple just released new versions of their powerbooks and they claim longer batterylife even with the 7200 rpm disks ....

Maybe because the drive can access the data and go back to null state faster?

Either way, the new powerbooks have more than just faster harddrives. There's other power-saving gnomes at work.

gus

Ok thanks guys...interesting reading. Now where does these new sata's sit in this argument ? I will make sure i get a 7200 but do i need to specify sata ?

dragon300zx

Humungus wrote:

Ok thanks guys...interesting reading. Now where does these new sata's sit in this argument ? I will make sure i get a 7200 but do i need to specify sata ?

Hmmm are sata's available in laptops? I haven't checked lately to see. If you can get sata GET SATA. It really really blows IDE (atapi) drives away.

Mike Lane

Here's the thing about photographers. Lots of us have programs like photoshop. Photoshop uses massive swap files when it is crunching its data. When your RAM is full, it pushes the remainder of that data to a temporary file on your hard drive. You can have 2GB of RAM (pretty much the max most laptops will take these days) and if you have a large enough image you're working on, your photoshop will still be agonizingly slow. Moreover, if you are running other programs at the same time as photoshop (like, oh, I don't know, say, WINDOWS!) your RAM is already partially full which means that it takes smaller images to fill up your RAM.

So faster hard drives are better. Faster connections to hard drives are better. I would go for a faster drive over a faster processor any day of the week. Why stop at 7200 RPM. Go with a 10,000 RPM if you can afford it.

FWIW

colourbox

I have a PowerBook. I don't burden the 5400RPM internal with swap files. If I'm in Photoshop I'm usually at a desk with a monitor plugged in anyway, so I also plug in a 7200RPM FireWire 800 external and that's where the Photoshop swap files are directed to go. That way the system and Photoshop don't have to fight over the poor little laptop disk. They each get their own disk.

Khaos

Due to the limitations on BUS speed (don't ask, just nod head knowingly) SATA drives won't give you much performance increase. Also the life span of SATA drives is currently much shorter than IDE.