Thinkpads Forum

erik wrote:if you don't like it, go on the internet and complain.

My points simply were, and remain:

1. My Hitachi is not dead quiet by any absolute or relative measure, I can certainly hear it in operation.

2. My Hitachi is actually noiser than my Seagates in my operating conditions.

Clearly there are a wide range of experiences as far drive noise levels go.

thormdac wrote: happy with the constant "clunckling" when the head parks?

I'm not experiencing any clunckling with my Seagate drives here!

Cheers,

Bill B.

bill, my comment quoted above regarding your 7K200 was meant purely a joke and should be taken as such.   if you find that your seagate drives are better then that's perfectly fine.   i wasn't arguing with you or trying to refute any points you were trying to make.

to everyone, i apologize for using the term "dead silent" in this context.   i never imagined it would be taken so literally.

@bill
yeah,
didnt mean to upset you, bill!

next time around in australia, i will bring my 2. hitachi `round and let you have "taste"

So before everyone starts hitting each other and getting back to my original question.
7200 = faster than 5400 and SSD (except cheap Transcend) = faster than hard disk. Everyone agree ?
And Eric, as a technical engineer I understand 'dead silent' as meaning just a figure of speech qualification !!!!

@adrianaitken

yes baby, you`ve got it...

adrianaitken wrote:7200 = faster than 5400 and SSD (except cheap Transcend) = faster than hard disk. Everyone agree ?

Not from me... : )

If you're talking about ONLY random reads, then the answer is probably yes.

See the article linked below if you're interested in the details.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... -iram.html

@loyukfai,

intresting article!-- though absolutely irrellevant to our discussion- " Iram "boasts" a maximum of 4 gigabyte storage

quote: "The maximum capacity of 4 gigabytes is unserious, too."

thormdac, my X61 doesn't have a PCI slot in it so the iRAM is not an option !!!! Wonder why Gigabyte didn't just add a SATA controller on the card making it an all-in-one solution.

Sorry I wasn't clear enough, but it's not my intent to compare flash with RAM.

Flash memory's write operations are relatively slow compared to its read operations. Even slower than platter-based disc drives as I understand.

And it's over simplified to say that, SSD is faster than 7200RPM drive.

Write speed was slow in early SSD's. The latest generation is much faster than any notebook HDD. Read/write about 120 MBs and access time almost 0.

agreed.   the samsung SSD in my X300 kills the 7K200 in my X61 according to HDTune.

note: the term "kills" used in this context is another figure of speech.   the SSD doesn't actually commit mortal physical harm to the 7K200.

richarddd wrote:Write speed was slow in early SSD's. The latest generation is much faster than any notebook HDD. Read/write about 120 MBs and access time almost 0.

If you're talking about the most expensive models out there, then I think SSD is faster than 7200RPM is probably true for most, if not all, cases. : )

Cheers.

thormdac wrote:@bill,

uh, oh...a seagate! happy with the constant "clunckling" when the head parks?

Mine makes no noise, its no louder the the 90GB hitachi that came in it. But this one is faster being a 200GB 7200RPM drive.

Well, I solved the dilemma by winning a Sandisk 32Gig SSD on ebay for only US$450. Claims to have 65M/s read, 55 M/s write which is still twice as fast as my existing disk !!!
I'm now looking at a NAS solution to store my main stuff. And I thought photography drained my wallet

My Sandisk SSD arrived and is at least as fast as the 5400 Fujistu that was in there.
Now, whose got a MP3 of a hard disk whirling and clunking that I can play in the background cos it's disturbingly quiet now

I've had Hitachi 7K200 in my X61 Tablet with boot up of over 130 seconds before "steady" (which never is in Vista). With Samsung SSD in X300 I get it up "steady" in about 35 seconds. Same OS, same programs and services and startup items running. In my case, SSD is much faster than 7200 rpm HDD and 7200 rpm was a bit faster than 5400 at boot up. 7K200 in my experience was worth the upgrade from 5400, not just for the sake of few seconds boot up time but mostly for working with bigger files. Just my impressions...

So for the CONTEXT here:

X6x laptops
5400 vs 7200 HDDs.

What conclusion can we derive?

crashnburn - see above !!! But then I won a SSD on eBay

In my opinion, (since I have a 5400 rpm lol), its not too big of a deal if your hard drive is properly defragged and all your doing on your tablet is mostly inking and working with pdf's and documents.

Unless I'm moving video files back and forth, the big-file speedup advantage won't be that significant I should think..

Thats what I used to think !!!!
However, loading megapixel digital camera images for editting shows the benefits of speed as does having 4Gig of RAM (currently running Server 08 to test it out). Yes, 5400RPM and 1Gig of RAM means I could still work but it would be far slower.
It all depends on what you use the laptop for - mainly surfing (a X6 series is overkill fullstop for that), onsite editing of images etc etc

adrianaitken wrote:Thats what I used to think !!!!
However, loading megapixel digital camera images for editting shows the benefits of speed as does having 4Gig of RAM (currently running Server 08 to test it out). Yes, 5400RPM and 1Gig of RAM means I could still work but it would be far slower.
It all depends on what you use the laptop for - mainly surfing (a X6 series is overkill fullstop for that), onsite editing of images etc etc

Hmm yea thats a good point. I can imagine the speed decrease if you are cycling through a bunch of 2-3 MB images or greater.