100 gig 4200rpm HD-any comments from users"

Can anyone that has a 100 gig 4200rpm HD comment on their experience? How does it compare (other than sheer capacity) with the current crop of 60/80 gig 5400rpm HD's? How does performance compare and acoustics ie is it quieter? As it it rotates slower, it ought to run cooler and be less taxing on the system cooling (ie the system fans should run less often and at a lower level). How have you found it? Would you recommend it over the smaller but higher rpm drives (everything else being equal)?

 

I have the 100gb drive and it is quiet and cool. There arfe no tics and no seeking noise. As for performance ram will mitigate a lot of that.

I did a test today and compiled a fairly large project on both this computer and my work computer which is something like 2.8ghz p4 512mb and 2 7200 rpm disks. This thing won! and by a lot. Now to be fair there are a couple of corporate viruses (McAfee) installed which read stuff over and over again but I was pretty happy. I could easily do real program development on this computer it is quite fast and it really hardly gets warm.

The fans never usually run hard and the only indication the drive is active is the light generally unless I am straining to hear it. I know someone with (non dell) 7200 rpm drive and you can surely hear that thing though even that was not really annoying but you can hear it.

I9300 2.0ghz 1.0gb ram 100gb disk 256MB NVIDIA 6800 dvd rw UXGA Bluetooth Intel WiFi Media Center

 

JustJimDelany, thank you - a very interesting post! The 4200rpm 100meg drive seems to be a pretty impressive performer. As so many times, the real world performance is made up of more factors than one technical aspect. A quiet cool drive seems pretty attractive in a notebook. I look forward to further posts...

 

adding the memory removes the need to page to the drive and also means that the disk cache is very large so more offten than not what is needed is already in memory. I don't have any way to know how this helps with battery life.

I am using the latest beta 2 of whidbey to build a solution which must have 20 projects too so it doesn't build in an instant either. For what I do this is actually a pretty good test of the computer. I am sure that a 7200 rpm disk would be even better but I wanted the bytes.

I9300 2.0ghz 1.0gb ram 100gb disk 256MB NVIDIA 6800 dvd rw UXGA Bluetooth Intel WiFi Media Center