[Thinkpad] drive speed

[RayBay]

We had great speed improvements with our 7200 rpm hard drives... Hitachi,
Western Digital Scorpio, Toshiba, and especially Seagate Momentum.  We did
not have improvements with the Fujitsu nor Samsung.

But our early failure rate went up on all but the Seagate.

We didn't notice significant differences between one laptop model and
another with Thinkpads, Dell Inspirons, nor Dell Latitudes.  We did find
that laptops by eMachines, HP, and Compaq overheated significantyl but they
have all been machines two years old or more.

We upgraded a lot of laptops to the larger faster drives, but have stopped
using others than the Seagate because of high failure rates.   One of the
notable failures was they seemed to slowed down dramatically before they
quit.   I don't recall noting any "slower" computers making a difference,
but that could have been the case.

But I would agree that the differences were not nearly as significant as the
move up from 4200 rpm to 5400 rpm.


RayBay


When the question of perceived versus nominal speed was
> discussed here "over a year" ago, everybody noticed an
> improvement between 4200 and 5400, but not everybody when going
> up to 7200.  But *maybe* those who didn't notice a difference
> had "slower" computers whose operations were not bottlenecked
> by drive speed at 5400.
>
> I wonder, is it fair to say that wear (and heat and failure) is
> proportional to the square of the rpm, given the same
> technology?


-- 
"I'm so busy doing nothing.. that the idea of
doing anything - which as you know, always
leads to something - cuts into the  nothing, then
then forces me to drop everything."

                                        Jerry Seinfeld