I recently purchased one 7200 3.5" Samsung drive, and one 5400 2.5" Hitachi drive and I'm wondering whether it is worth the trouble to replace the 5400 with another 7200, performance wise. I haven't done any real tests, but in terms of buffered read speed... the Samsung measures 61.4 MB/s and the Hitachi 42.6 MB/s.
Point is, if I compare startup times, I installed the same linux system on both disks, and it takes about 72 sec for the Samsung, and 77 sec for the Hitachi, to boot up the system measured from the moment the kernel gets loaded. That is quite a difference from the 110 sec my old Maxtor disk gave me. So disk performance is not really a bottleneck anymore here. And once I've used any program once, it's files end up in the disk cache so startup times for applications are also not really much of a matter anymore. In my current system (Athlon 1800+) there is not really much to gain from disk speed improvements. If I need to do any real disk intensive operations, I just use the Samsung, which is my data disk, or a combination of the two, to reap max benefits.
But my harddisks will last a lot longer hopefully than my current mobo+cpu+mem combo, and I'm wondering... does a newer system benefit from the 50% performance increase seen in 7200rpm disks? Do you think it is worth the trouble and money to replace it with a 7200 notebook drive? It will cost me about 25 euro's extra to get a 7200 model, as added to the €37 this 40GB model cost me.
Thinking about this, I don't think it is worth the trouble. When the future comes, I'll deal with that. In the mean time, enough is enough.
It is a very strange experience, btw, not to hear my harddisk rattling anymore. Now I don't know if it's doing anything
. I need some software sensors to show me what they're doing.Even though I hardly can hear these drives, with all the wind and traffic and such, when I put them to standby, it is a blessing. Especially the Samsung. It doesn't have good suspension yet, and it is a real blessing when it's vibrational hum ceases. It's like a load falling from my body. And even though the Hitachi notebook drive makes very little noise, I can too feel it when it goes into standby.
Can you imagine... my harddisk temperature monitoring utility kept pulling my Samsung out of standby in order to read its temperature...thus defeating the whole idea of trying to keep it cool.
