Question about rpm, seek time on rust-drives ?

[lmintnewb2]

Basic situation ... a neighbor of mine killed my one and only decent spec laptop, he drowned it by spilling a beer on it !

Well as I tend to stay under financed lately, finally broke down and bought a used laptop off my city's craigslist. Actually thing is working very well, specs dual-core intel cpu @ 2.1ghz or so, 4gb-ddr2 and a whopping 250gb hard drive ... WOW ! Sheesh the thing only cost me $90 bucks. The hdd is what I'm interested in here it's 7200rpm and no doubt has a better seek time than the 5400rpm on the former system.

Here's the thing, even though the former laptop had a quad-core, faster FSB and ddr3, this old laptop seems to have about the same speed and performance as that higher-spec one did. I mean in terms of responsiveness etc. Even boots to working desktop almost as quickly as the much more powerful box with the cheapy platter drive 30secs vs 25secs on the other. It kinda blows me away a little bit, I always config my OS's to be pretty much the same, with my preferences set and so the OSs installed on both systems are VERY similar or same.

Have always had good experiences with Dell's laptops or desktop. Just seems they tend to use quality parts. How big of an impact on performance have you personally found differences like that to have on gnu/Linux fellows. Overwhelming majority of system(s) I've run gnu/Linux on had 5400rpm drives. This is the first 7200 and it's got me really curious. What say you fellow nixers ? In your experience can it make such a noticeable difference in performance ?

[lmintnewb2]

Would normally resort to my go to source of information on any topic or research subject aka: google. Was hoping for some first hand experience feedback from some of the fine gnu/Linux users here in LM's community though. Anyway, thanks for any informed/experienced responses on the topic folks.

Personally wouldn't have believed it should or could make such a difference but this experience has me re-eval'ing it and wondering if what should be such a small difference could account for it. SSD sure ... should be blazing responsiveness in terms of disk i/o but a better spec platter drive ? Simply wouldn't think so, shrugs.

[BG405]

I'd expect about 25% reduction in average seek time with a 7200RPM drive, compared to 5400RPM. It's worth looking at the manufacturers' specs.

[lmintnewb2]

Comes out to be approx 33% faster in terms of throughput and speed ( Oops also the size of the hdd's cache is going to come into play too). Doesn't matter, dorking around with this brought hybrid drives to front of mind. Not that am going to bother installing one on this box, it'd just be pushing the bottleneck around. Though would no doubt have an additional and very noticeable effect on performance regardless. An SSHD even with a much lower rpm would blow the doors off a much higher rpm rated conventional platter drive anyway.

Actually I might, nowhere near as pricey or storage space constrained as a true SSD, not going to be as fast obviously either but it's a nice compromise imo, getting a serious speed gain for cheap and 1-2tbs of storage space to boot. Even the known to be really good brands are very reasonable in price point for what someone gets for it.

Am really pleased with this dinosaur system I purchased in any event. Mentioned have always found that Dell put's together some rugged and quality pc's. Always had good experience laptop or desktop with them.

[catweazel]

[quote="lmintnewb2"it'd just be pushing the bottleneck around.[/quote]
It's not necessarily so black and white. Once a cache fills up it can only empty as fast as the destination drive can write data therefore it can only continue to be filled up at the same rate if the payload is greater than the size of the cache. Increasing the speed of the storage device, e.g. going from HDD to SSD, will dramatically increase the throughput, possibly to as fast as either the RAM or CPU can go on lower-end machines.

[lmintnewb2]

^ True ... that's what I meant, always going to be a bottleneck on given hardware. You can push it around on that system and make trade-offs to meet someone's preferences. ie: Faster performance but comes with taxing the processor(s) ... whatever. Depends on usecase. For general computing it's kind of silly imo. Even this old dinosaur as it is blazes along very well and loads webpages more than quickly enough to be satisfying. I don't NEED to do anything else to it but need and want, that's a totally different ballgame.

[BG405]

A 33% increase in throughput sounds like a pretty reasonable upgrade to me (that's where I calculated the 25% seek time reduction; an educated guess TBH, means the same thing & nice to see the confirmation you posted). It would be interesting to see how well an SSD performs in comparison, not to mention the potential increase in battery life.

[lmintnewb2]

Would make a massive difference in through-put, even a good SSHD = hybrid drive with a much slow speed spindle would blast a much faster conventional HDD out of the water. Provided the controller chip has some time to decide which files-etc are most often used and moves them into the NAND on itself. Honestly while I'm stoked about SSHD's, they aren't overly expensive. Really limited too, much more drive space but if it's performance you're after why not go full SSD.

Was looking at one model from Scandisk ( after reviews seems to be a good brand and they were bought out by Western Digital, which is certainly a good and well respected brand.) It's called Scandisk SSD Plus with a 240gb capacity brandnew with 3yr warranty for all of $75 bucks and free shipping ! Personally could get 10 or so gnu/Linux installs on it, wouldn't as that'd be a bit cramped and would want to leave space for shared partition(s) or whatever on the SSD.

End result though, sucker would blaze !!!

Pointless anal edit: Just about the time I post anything about tech or gnu/Linux 4,404 other things jump to mind and feel a compulsion to drone on about them too, so AHHHHH !

Anyway, mentioned depending upon specs, it's always going to be a game of pushing the bottleneck around, if you know your hardware and the tech available + even connection and possible limitations or whatever ... ie: Monster comp on 56k dial-up. ) Then you can find the right balance to get the most out of it. For example in the proposed cheapy but looks to be good enough quality for me/my ole laptop and wallet too. Could've gotten a lower cap, lower priced SSD with better read/write speeds and build materials (metal casing vs plastic) = thus more resistant to shocks etc.

Though when comes to dropping your laptop I have this simple advice anyway. DON'T DO IT.

Thing is on this old thing how much data can it's buses even handle/ move around in x-span of time, same for the processor, even though it's actually pretty decent @2.1ghz x2 but still if I slammed in the fa$test SSD known to humanity. It'd overwhelm some other component(s) on the pc's capacity to keep up, thus never top out it's full potential anyway. Thusly just pushing the bottleneck around. However with the SSD model I'm checking out there, right component for the job. Would definitely be a drastic increase in disk i/o speeds and so performance.

[BG405]

One of my mates has said he'll donate a 256(?)GB SSD so I look forward to seeing how it will perform. That and a new battery would hopefully mean I don't have to take this lot with me everywhere:

Extension_and_PSU.JPG

BTW @lmintnewb2: Love the avatar!