120GB Drive speed vs. 250 vs. 320

MacWorld's review mentioned that the 320GB HD is faster than the 120GB drive because the former is dual platter, and the 120GB is single platter. I am looking at the 250GB drive. Does anyone know if it is dual or single platter, and will I really see a difference between them?
Quoting the MacWorld review: "in Finder Unzip Archive test, which is largely dependent on the performance of the hard drive, the new models are 17 and 35 percent faster than the previous top-of-the-line mini. Interestingly, the difference in Finder performance between the two new models—the $799 mini is 22 percent faster—is largely a result of the top-end mini’s hard drive outperforming the one in the $599 model. (Although both new minis use 5,400 rpm drives, there are other factors that affect drive speed. For example, the 120GB drive is a single-platter model, whereas the 320GB drive is a dual-platter.)

Yes this is why drive spindle speeds like 5200 vs 7200 aren't as important these days and it's harder to benchmark drives now since the increased density of the larger drives makes a big difference now.

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I I have a late 2005 power PC G5 that I want to bring back to life. I need to replace the original hard drive, a Maxtor 250 GB Sata. Can I replace it with modern drives, SATA 5-6 etc?

I have a late 2005 power PC G5 that I want to bring back to life. I need to replace the original hard drive, a Maxtor 250 GB Sata. Can I replace it with modern drives, SATA 5-6 etc?

I knew I should never get rid of my old G5's. By the way, there is a browser still supported for the PPC, TenFourFox, if you're not using it already. Go to the Floodgap website (they author it) download it for free. The only thing it doesn't support is the Flash plugin, but the browser works great. Other video types are supported. It's based on Firefox, and runs most of the plugins and add-ons. It's very fast, and beats all other browsers on the browser compatibility and speed test. That's now my default on my G5's. Firefox and Safari are no longer supported. As far as the OS, both Tiger and Leopard were solid for me. The reason, as I stated before, was iMovie. The version in Tiger with iLife was far superior to what Apple changed it to. They 'dumbed it down' for the masses. Even the newest iLife 11 on my Mac Pro quad isn't is good, in my opinion. So Leopard should be fine for you. It's a much larger browser in terms of sheer megabytes and disk space, but it's fine. As far as getting an OS disc, I'm seeing Tiger for about $45.00, Leopard for $50 - 60.00 on that famous auction site. As far as RAM, I have 8GB in my G5 2.3, but you should check Activity Monitor when you are running your apps. See how much green slice you have left (unused RAM). You might find you don't need eight. A Mac Pro will grab more free RAM than a PPC machine will. I have a hard time maxing out use of my 8 on the PPC. Not true with the eight on my Mac Pro. The OS doesn't hesitate to grab and use it. You might be OK with 6GB on your PPC. More will not make you faster, as long as you still have free RAM available. As far as backup on your resurrected machine: look for a firewire enabled backup if can. Use CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) and make a clone backup. Next time your PPC machine wipes out the hard drive, just take your Firewire drive and plug it into another PPC machine, and you can select it as your boot drive. You'll be back and running in five minutes. You can also take the physical drive out of your enclosure, and put it in your tower to replace the failed drive, and you'll be back to where you were in less than ten minutes, OS and all. The PowerMac has an 800 port, so you can do the 800 on the machine to an 800 port on your backup. A firewire 800 to 800 cable is only about $8.00. It runs nice and fast through the 800 port. I like the OWC Mercury Extreme enclosures. They use USB, Firewire 800, and eSATA, so all your options are open.

12" 1.33Ghz iBook Hard Drive speed?

hey all,
i'm curious to know if any of you have ended up w/ 5400rpm drives in your 12" 1.33Ghz iBooks. i know of a couple ppl on a diff forum who got stock iBooks and for whatever reason they got 5400rpm 40GB drives. offhand i know there's very little price difference between the 4200 and 5400 drives, so maybe apple is just streamlining their supply line? i'm just wondering if this drive speed is common for the latest revision of the 12" iBooks even tho it isn't something they advertise on the iBook page.
thanks

The hard drive is not a user-installable part. You would void your warranty or AppleCare Protection Plan to open the iBook and install a drive yourself. Since you can't buy a bare hard drive from Apple, they won't install one you've purchased somewhere else. An Apple Authorized Service Provider could install a new hard drive for you, though, without voiding your warranty.
Apple buys hard drives on the open market. If the 4,200RPM drives become constrained, they may find some 5,400RPM drives for a good price and install those for a while. Since the hard drive speed is not specified at the online Apple store, the included component can vary.
I would ask you why, exactly, you would consider the increased cost to upgrade a hard drive like this? I can edit DV and author DVDs with the 80GB 4,200RPM drive in my 1GHz G4 PowerBook. I've NEVER had an issue with my hard drive doing these kinds of operations. You should have a very good user experience with your 4,200RPM hard drive.
-Doug

How do you confirm the hard drive speed

I am trying to confirm my hard drive speed. I have looked at "about this mac" but can't seem to find it. New MBP 15 inch running Lion

found it.
About this mac, more info, system report, serial-ATA, then scroll down to the nformation about the apple HDD, and there it is under "rotational rate"

Writing to dvd with super drive - speed?

I understand from the user manual that I can write to either + or - dvd disks. However they are sold with different speed ratings. Which speed of disk should I buy? Also, in anticipation of further questions, if in 6 months time faster dvd disks are being sold, can I start using faster disks?
Thanks, LJ

Hi Louis XV11:
I understand from the user manual that I can write to
either + or - dvd disks. However they are sold with
different speed ratings. Which speed of disk should I
buy?
If you have the first generation of MB's then you can write to DVD's at 4X and a second generation (LATE 2006) you can write at 6X.
Nowadays you can use any speed, if the disk is rated faster than your drive, it will use your max drive speed, ( so if you have a 16X disk and a 6X drive it will burn at 6X) and if the speed rating is slower than you drives max speed, it will burn at that speed, so you don't need to worry.
For Important data, I would recommend either Apple or Verbatim Disks, and for video, home movies (iMovie, iDVD) use -R.
Also, in anticipation of further questions, if
in 6 months time faster dvd disks are being sold, can
I start using faster disks?
As above
-Robert

The COMBO 3.5" ION 120GB Drive w/ Tri-Select

Hi,
i saw this drive on sale at a local computer store. I am just wondering if anyone knows if the COMBO 3.5" ION™ 120GB Drive w/ Tri-Select is a good drive or not. all i need it is for backing up some large files. i wont keep it on all the time. thanks.
17" PowerBook 1.5 Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.7)

bought something else

Optical Drive Speeds

Is anyone happy with the optical drive speeds in the new iMacs?
I am not. Mine is terribly slow.
I'm on my third 27" iMac. The first one had a dead firewire port so I couldn't move my data. The second one had a painfully slow drive. I had the entire computer replaced since it was less than a week old. The optical drive in the third one is just as bad.
Here are some typical times to copy data to my HD:
187 mb 4 min
228 mb 2 min
147 mb 4 min
267 mb 6 min
482 mb 11 min
725 mb 17 min
As a comparison, I copied 1.99 gb of graphics files from a DVD to my internal HD on a two year old Mac Pro tower running a 2 x 2.66 Dual core and 2 gigs of RAM on Leopard.
It took 5 minutes.

I share your pain. It's just taken 32 mins to transfer 4.39 GB of data from DVD to desktop. A USB memory stick would have done it in a jiffy, more or less...
Is this normal? Is there anything I can do to optimise/fix this?
BB

Hard drive speed for streaming video

Anyone run into a similar problem as this one:
I recently purchased the HD version of Quantum of Solace (great movie by the way) and I wanted to add this movie into the folder where I keep the rest of my movies. The "planned storage location" was on the MyBook drive connected to my timecapsule. All the SD movies (less than 1.5 G file size) will stream perfectly to my Apple TV. However, this HD file (~ 3.5 G file size) will only play about 10 seconds before the motion on the TV screen freezes. The picture freezing lasts about 5 seconds while the apple TV buffer catches up!
Right now, the solution to my problem has been to place the HD movie onto my computer internal hard drive and then tell itunes where to find the file. When I play the movie this way, it never misses a beat!!!
My guess is that the internal hard drive connection rate is faster (not USB) versus the external USB drive. Could is also be the drive speed? Any thoughts out there in cyber Apple TV land?
(P.S. I don't like to put the movies directly onto the apple TV hard drive simply because I will fill it up without even trying very hard - I own lots and lots of movies).
Regards,
imovie storage hog

both HDDs you have will be the same speed... ie 7200rpm.
the only difference between them is that one is internal (either IDE or SATA) and one is USB (1 or 2?)
if you external USB drive is only USB1 (or the USB port you have it connected to is only USB1) then that is much much slower than both your internal IDE or SATA connection and USB2

How does hard drive speed impact iMovie performance

I'm thinking of getting one of the newly released 15" MacBook pro laptops. For hard drive choices I can get 750GB @ 5400 RPM or 500GB @ 7200 RPM (SSD Drives are too expensive for me). How does hard drive speed impact iMovie performance?

Most of my videos are .mov. Currently I'm using a ContourGPS and it saves the files as .mov H264 and iMovie converts it. It think it's uncompressing the file using Apple Intermediate codec, the extension is still .mov after the iMovie conversion.

CD / DVD surface scan utility / drive speed?

www.cdspeed2000.com
I'm an audio engineer.
About a year ago a friend of mine persuaded me to try out a Mac, which I've used in tandem with my PC since I got it. I do prefer OS X, but the apparent lack of a CD / DVD surface scan & drive speed app could ultimately be a deal breaker. It is the only thing I've found that my Mac simply cannot do native in OS X (perform a CD surface & sector scan). It's a shame because I really wanted to make the switch. Does anyone know an app that performs similarly to Opti Drive Speed (www.cdspeed2000.com)?

Really, this is the Logic Pro 8 forum? gasp
I figured people working with Logic Pro 8 would have a better chance of knowing about a surface scan app than in another forum.
If I could find a surface scan app with google or versiontracker, would I be asking here?
If it is such an easy utility to duplicate, then why isn't there one for OS X?

Hard Drive Speed Difference Between FireWire 800 and Internal Drive

Right now I have my entire 1.5 TB Lightroom photo library on an external drive connected to my new Mac Pro via FireWire 800. Will I experience dramatic or even noticeable speed improvements if I move this drive to one of the internal SATA hard drive bays in my Mac Pro?
I would likely buy a new drive and SuperDuper the external to this new drive I put in the Mac Pro.
Thanks,
Matt

SATA II 3Gb is only the controller bus and has almost nothing to do with actual individual drive speed. Confusing the bus interface with hard drive speeds is not a clear way to compare.
Just pull the drive out of the FW case is all you probably need to do. Actual FW800 is less than 80MB/sec and more like 72-75MB/sec - which is as slow as your hdd gets from slow inner tracks.
Other than green, most 1.5TB drives average minimum 75MB/sec to max 115 with average in mid-90s. And the first 1/2 of a drive is where best performance comes from.
The size of the data and media library, amont of free space, all play a role.
I think FW should be left to backups, an alternate boot volume, off line data.
If it was Aperture library, but otherwise SSD is not realistic or viable. Nobody uses RAM disks as they are inefficient.
I still find 10K VelociRaptor ($279 / 600GB) fast, smoother, more responsive, great for system and data drives, even if they are only 135MB/sec, or about what some of your 2TB drives can offer.
QUICK TAKES - A striped pair of Velociraptor 600G 10K HDDs matches the speed of one SSD. For less that the price of one 256G SSD, you can buy two 10K 600G Velociraptor HDDs. If you stripe them (RAID 0), you get the same sustained transfer speed as the SSD. http://www.barefeats.com/quick.html
If you are not already using all the internal drive bays, just nice to have them handy before going external. Also take a look at two other articles on Barefeats:
THINK INSIDE THE BOX: Internal Storage Innovations for the Mac ProOctober 6th, 2010
EXTERNAL STORAGE INNOVATIONS for Mac Pros -- (Added results for ATTO R680 SAS RAID adapter.)

External drive 'speeds'??? 5400 - 7200 rpm?

I'm on location. I have to buy a couple of external drives quick. I'm used to buying my drives straight from a distributor, shipped by mail - he just ships the 7200 rpms. I go into Best Buy, Office Depot, Target ... and non of the external drives have the drive speed listed on the boxes anymore, nor on the net either, it appears.
Is this because all the new drives are automatically 7200 rpm?
Is there a way I can find out what the speed of this drive I bought is actually running at 7200 rpm before I start loading it with data?: a Seagate Backup Plus 2T.
Any help would be most appreciated,
Thank you...
Ben

Hi Bengt,
I shoot HD all the time. Often XDCam, which has no problem with the USB2 -- I've made a dozen films in this format over the last year or so, and have had no issues. I haven't had any trouble with full HD ProRes either. At least up to HQ 422. 444 would be another issue entirely I agree. Sometimes I just have to bite the bullet ... on location, everything happening, no waiting for the camera guy, etc. etc. and go for whatever I can get. The new drive, whatever its rpm, seems to be handling the XDCam just fine.
Thank you, and all the best,
B

Thumb drive speed

Is this the right forum to ask about thumb drive speed? I bought a 16GB HP 115W thumb drive and formatted it with two 8GB partitions, one formatted Mac OS Journaled and one for MS-DOS (windows xp). The Partition Map Scheme for the entire drive I set to Master Boot Record. (Windows thought the drive was unformatted when I had GUID Partition table. I didn't try the 'Apple Partition Map' but it sounds like XP would not like it.)
I would think that writing to the Mac Journaled partition from the mac would be faster than writing to the MS-DOS one, but it doesn't seem to be. Also, it seems like the write times range wildly even to the same partition. Like, I write 150Mb to the mac partition and it takes ~3 minutes. Then I copy the same data again and it takes ~13 minutes?
Did I format it wrong? Anyone know how best to set it up so that I can write files to this thing from both an Intel SnowLeopard iMac and a Windows XP iMac??
Thanks
Bob

Bob Sabiston wrote:
Is this the right forum to ask about thumb drive speed?
Not really. A hardware question, even if it involves compatibility with 3rd party hardware, should be posting in a forum more specific to your Macintosh. There could be peculiarities about your particular machine's USB ports that might inform an answer.
I would think that writing to the Mac Journaled partition from the mac would be faster than writing to the MS-DOS one, but it doesn't seem to be. Also, it seems like the write times range wildly even to the same partition. Like, I write 150Mb to the mac partition and it takes ~3 minutes. Then I copy the same data again and it takes ~13 minutes?
Did I format it wrong? Anyone know how best to set it up so that I can write files to this thing from both an Intel SnowLeopard iMac and a Windows XP iMac??
Just format it as a FAT partition and don't worry so much about it. The speed differences between a Mac partition and a FAT partition are tiny compared to the overall slowness of an USB flash drive. I don't know how fast your HP drive is compared to others, but I know there is a wide speed range. Plus, not all flash drives are as compatible as others.
The reason why it took so much longer the 2nd time is that USB flash is also very slow to read. Once you had the data already on the drive, it had to read that data in order to overwrite it. The speed of a flash drive is hard to determine. The advertised speed is overall throughput as if you were copying a single 16 GB file. The latency is so large that copying many small files takes much, much longer. Plus, the file allocation tables are different. If you copy many small files, you will find that you have much less space on the drive that you had estimated.

Serial ata 133 vs ata 66 vs lacie firewire external d2 drive speed issues

I have an older power mac tower that has built in ata 66. I have a large music collection (300 gigs) that resides in a lacie firewire (D2) external drive. When I make a play list, itunes makes me wait about 20 seconds to create the playlist which drives me crazy (spinning beachball). I also use the computer for logic pro.
I want to increase the internal capacity of this computer. I am wondering....is the external firewire drive faster than what an ata 133, 7200 rpm internal drive would be. Secondly, is ata 133 really that much faster than ata 66. Thirdly, does anyone know if drive speed has anything to do with the itunes sluggishness?
Any suggestions?
power mac g4 dual 450 Mac OS X (10.4.1)

Wow. I was thinking of posting a similar question myself. I have a G3 as a hardware router (for filtering) and I was wondering how to speed it up.
The research I've done so far has yielded these tidbits:
1) ATA 133 isn't much faster than ATA 66 for a single drive. Why? Most drives don't transfer data quickly enough to use the whole 66 Mb/sec bandwidth of ATA 66 anyways. The newest drives that have burst speeds above 66 Mbs could make a difference, but burst speeds are rarely achieved. I've been looking and I've found lots of ATA 100 drives, but no ATA 133 drives. You'd have to get a 10k Raptor or a RAID setup to see an appreciable difference from ATA 66 to ATA 133.
2) The upper speed limit of FW 400 is 50 Mb/sec. However, the data goes through the FW bridge, which then gets fed to the native IDE drive on the other side. This takes time. External FW drives of the same RPM and protocol (ATA 33, etc) are slightly slower than their internal brethren.
HTH,
~FifthWheel

Read/write drive speed question

I've been watching the read/write speeds in Activity Monitor while I've been transfering about 250 gigs from an internal drive to an external FW 800 Weibetech Drivedock. I notice that if I plug in any other FW drive at all, even another FW800 to the back of the drivedock, the transfer speeds suddenly drop from about 43mb to about 19 or 20mb. Also happens when I plug in to the front of the Mac Pro.
Why is this... can those speeds only be achieved when one drive is plugged into the computer? How can I have more drives plugged in but maintain the fast transfer speeds?
thanks

If my schematic reading-ability isn't too off, USB is the same bridge, same controller, different bus(es):
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/HardwareDrivers/Conceptual/MacPro_0608/Articles/M43_0906arch.html

120GB Drive speed vs. 250 vs. 320

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