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kitenski

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 30, 2008
445
175
Leeds, UK
Morning all,

With the release of Snow Leopard I thought I'd also upgrade my system disk as I've been thinking my system isn't that fast to boot anymore.

What would make the biggest difference in boot time? Is it RPM, ie a 7200 RPM disk, cache size or something else?

Or to put it another way can anyone recommend a new system disk for best performance?

Cheers,

Greg
 

California

macrumors 68040
Aug 21, 2004
3,884
90
Morning all,

With the release of Snow Leopard I thought I'd also upgrade my system disk as I've been thinking my system isn't that fast to boot anymore.

What would make the biggest difference in boot time? Is it RPM, ie a 7200 RPM disk, cache size or something else?

Or to put it another way can anyone recommend a new system disk for best performance?

Cheers,

Greg

Greg, you mean you want to buy a new hard drive that you use as your start up disc?

RPM speed plus cache are most important; and actually a larger capacity in terms of gigabytes also increases speed, though not as importantly as RPM speed or cache size.

You'd be pretty safe with a new 1 Terabyte hard drive, 7200 rpm and 32mb Cache.
 

kitenski

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 30, 2008
445
175
Leeds, UK
Greg, you mean you want to buy a new hard drive that you use as your start up disc?

You'd be pretty safe with a new 1 Terabyte hard drive, 7200 rpm and 32mb Cache.

Yup that's what I meant, buy a new hard drive, I will start looking for some offers based on that criteria in the UK, cheers!

Greg
 

Tesselator

macrumors 601
Jan 9, 2008
4,601
6
Japan
I agree that something like a 1TB WD Black would be a good choice. But cache plays little or no roll here. Cache is mostly for write operations. Booting your system is mostly read operations. For rotational media platter density is probably the most critical factor here. The blacks and I believe most 1TB drives are still not 500GB per platter like the samsungs are. See: http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/29/samsungs-1tb-spinpoint-f3-hard-drive-serves-500gb-per-platter/

"The boost in areal density provides up to 30 percent higher performance when compared to a three platter 1TB drive in the same 3.5-inch form factor, and the reduction in mechanical parts also makes it less likely to fail prematurely."​
So choose something with 500GB platter densities and you'll be better off. Especially at 7200 RPM or more. Here's another: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=3aae0e8b467ae110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD


.
 

OZMP

macrumors 6502
Feb 18, 2008
321
0
The 1TB Seagate 7200.12 with 32MB Cache is my pick.

I use Seagates at home, I see too many dead WD's at work :p
 

nanofrog

macrumors G4
May 6, 2008
11,719
3
I agree that something like a 1TB WD Black would be a good choice. But cache plays little or no roll here. Cache is mostly for write operations. Booting your system is mostly read operations. For rotational media platter density is probably the most critical factor here. The blacks and I believe most 1TB drives are still not 500GB per platter like the samsungs are. See: http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/29/samsungs-1tb-spinpoint-f3-hard-drive-serves-500gb-per-platter/

"The boost in areal density provides up to 30 percent higher performance when compared to a three platter 1TB drive in the same 3.5-inch form factor, and the reduction in mechanical parts also makes it less likely to fail prematurely."​
So choose something with 500GB platter densities and you'll be better off. Especially at 7200 RPM or more. Here's another: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=3aae0e8b467ae110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD


.
Yep. :)

BTW, the Caviar Blacks are 334GB/platter.

You could also use the software RAID0 in the disk utility and stripe two or three idential disks to run in RAID0.
Definitely an inexpensive way to get a performance increase. It also works for both random and seqential access. :)
 
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