Re: PowerBook disk drive
--- "Andrew J. Barr" <andrew.james.barr@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Can someone tell me why Apple computer hard drives,
> at least in laptops,
> are very slow? E.g. is the drive or the controller?
one reason is that a lower power hd saves battery.
> Responsiveness in my
> Powerbook still seems rather bad, and from what I
> can tell it seems to
an external drive IMHO is going to be the fastest.
but a couple other things
cache sizes vary a lot. you can read this from your
dmesg output.
my experience hints that certain sizes are more
standardized and hence by economies of scale may
be better quality. for instance 10GB drives are all
bad it seems and 20s are all pretty good (unless too
small) - why they are still made new. maybe (but
i don't know for sure !) a smaller yet faster
internal drive and an external for storage/speed
at home could be a pretty good bet.
another far out idea is do you have enough RAM ??
because it is also used for caching/buffering besides
what the disk has built in. if you are short of
ram you will have to be doing much more disk reading
(even before you are swapping a lot). But it doesn't
sound like that was it for you.
Brian
> be much better starting programs for a second
> time--either an app like
> Firefox or just logging out and logging back into
> GNOME, e.g. after disk
> reads are cached in RAM. Near as I can tell the disk
> drive I have is a
> 5400 RPM drive. The hdparm -t numbers with this
> drive and another 5400
> RPM 100GB drive in a Thinkpad are not all that
> different--30-32 MB/sec
> in the PB versus 38-40 MB/sec in the Thinkpad--is
> that difference enough
> to cause a noticeable responsiveness issue when
> reading from the disk? I
> can and will swap out the drives, but I am loathe to
> open this computer
> and do major surgery unless absolutely necessary[0].
> This is an awesome
> machine--well-designed CPU architecture and bells
> and whistles that make
> it a nice computer even 18 months later--I'd like to
> use it to it's
> potential.
>
> [0] This is why:
>
http://www.colug.net/pipermail/colug432/2007-April/004311.html
>
>
> --
> Andrew J. Barr
>
> "Why must I fail at every attempt at masonry?"
> -- Homer Simpson, "Mom and Pop Art" [AABF15]
>
>
> --
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