[Ti] 4200 vs. 5400 rpm int. hd: decision?

[Trevor J. Hutley]

At 10:00 -0500 7-2-2003, Malcolm Hamilton wrote:
>Hello -
>thanks to those who've weighed in on the subject of getting rid of 
>the Dock.  I've found a little app on VersionTracker called 
>'dock-a-bye', which claims to do just this.  I'll try it when I get 
>the chance and get back to the list.
>
>Another question I'd love to revisit, regarding hard drives:  I have 
>a 400MHz Titanium, whose 10GB int. drive is almost full.  I want to 
>get a 40GB drive to replace it with - - should I get the 4200 rpm or 
>5400 rpm Travelstar?  I remember a discussion about this a while 
>ago, but it quickly got too technical for me.  What's the bottom 
>line, please?  Which is faster, more dependable?
>If the 5400 is indeed faster, generally, what about specifically - - 
>would my 400MHz processor be able to make use of the extra speed of 
>the 5400 rpm?
>
>Just in case it matters:  I use my Titanium for mostly regular 
>things, but will shortly be doing some video editing on a G4 tower. 
>I'll probably want to take the odd project on the road with me - - 
>this would involve using an ext. firewire drive, but the project 
>files would have to be on my internal drive.  I know for video, 
>faster is usually better, but I still don't know if the 5400 is 
>faster generally, or, in the case of my 400MHz, specifically.

Malcolm - I have a Ti-500 and upgraded my HD to the IBM Travelstar 40 
GNX, which is a 5400 rpm drive.   My view is that I always need some 
aspect of my Ti-book to run FASTER, so buying a faster disk made 
sense to me.  Since OS X uses the disk quite a lot (virtual memory), 
a faster disk will likely speed up this aspect.  I do no video work 
(yet) so this was not an issue for me.  I will add more RAM (I have 
512 Mb at the moment, but I expect that 768 or 1024 Mb will speed 
things up a little  - due to less need for virtual memory, less 
spinning beach ball intervals,....).  Small speed increments have 
also come from the OS X updates.  I eagerly wait 10.2.4, to see if 
that helps a little......

regards,  Trevor