okay, I brought a 12" Powerbook... and I didn't realize the hard drive was 4300rpm? Anyway, I want to buy a Firewire 800 120GB hard drive... now, when i am at home or the office, is it possible to use it as a startup hard drive over the internal powerbook hard drive... i assume it would be a little quicker because is 7200rpm... but may be the firewire port will slow it down because I am using firewire 400 instead of 800... any suggestion?
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Firewire Hard Drive use it as a START UP hard drive?
- Thread starter SLJ
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Well, you can certainly use a Firewire drive as your startup drive, but a Firewire 400 drive will be slower than the internal drive.
now, booting off an iPod would be slower then the internal hardd-drive but I am not sure about the Firewire 400 hard-driver... i expect the Firewire hard drive to be faster.. consider is transfer close to 40MB/sec compare to what?
Anyone know the internal Hard Drive speed?
Anyone know the internal Hard Drive speed?
First of all your PB 12" has a 4200RPM drive.
In your PB a 4200 drive is NOT going to make a lot of difference in speed vs a 7200. There aren't the same bottle necks as there are in PCs.
Booting off a FW HD is going to be most likely the same speed as ur internal because it's not on the IDE Bus. Your internal ATA/100 HD gets speeds of up to 298Mbps.
Use the Firewire for storage. I wouldnt recommnend booting up for it all the time. Especially because then you have 2 different systems one when you are at your desk and one when you are travelling or not at your desk.
Apple uses the slower drives to keep heat and battery consumption down.
All PB's have 4200 drives. And you really shouldn't even notice. If you want to do anything to ur PB to speed it up...MAX the RAM.
MacBoyX
I agree and disagree.
RAM is a must but I have recently upgraded the factory installed internal 10GB 4200RPM to a 40GB 5400RPM in my 2001 iceBook and the difference in speed is really obvious.
xbench before: 37.46
xbench after: 43.60
4200 really does suck.
Anyone thinking of doing the upgrade should definitely check out xlr8yourmac.com if you're interested.
i_b_joshua
If you're really interested in the faster hard drive, TransIntl now sells a 7200 rpm iBook/PBook hard drive in 60GB for $345.
While it doesn't solve all the storage issues a 120GB FW800 drive solves, you'd be certain to reap whatever benefits the upgrade offers. I'd keep in mind that Apple itself said that it wasn't going to move to 5400rpm notebook drives because they were unable to find a significant performance advantage. (In the interest of full disclosure, I'd note that this didn't stop me from getting a 5400rpm drive when I upgraded my TiBook HD to 40GB.)
Also, the customer service at TransIntl was quite good -- they sent me the wrong drive (bad) but overnighted me the right one the same day I FedEx-ed back the wrong one and phoned them with the tracking number (very good).
While it doesn't solve all the storage issues a 120GB FW800 drive solves, you'd be certain to reap whatever benefits the upgrade offers. I'd keep in mind that Apple itself said that it wasn't going to move to 5400rpm notebook drives because they were unable to find a significant performance advantage. (In the interest of full disclosure, I'd note that this didn't stop me from getting a 5400rpm drive when I upgraded my TiBook HD to 40GB.)
Also, the customer service at TransIntl was quite good -- they sent me the wrong drive (bad) but overnighted me the right one the same day I FedEx-ed back the wrong one and phoned them with the tracking number (very good).
i can pretty much guarantee you that the difference in performance you are seeing is due more to the capacity of the drive than the speed. 10GB is just too cramped a space to run OS X in. The more full a HD gets, the worse its performance gets.
Fair point. I did think of that but I prefer to beleive the speed increase had something to do with the extra yen I spent on the 5400 HD.
i_b_joshua
Hmm, fair points for both guys, but I believe a faster hard drive is faster performance. That's why they make 4200rpm, 5400rpm & 7200rpm... and others hard drive. Buffer size does matter... I be shock is the system is not quicker if installed a quicker hard drive.