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7200 RPM or 5400 RPM for my Laptop

Sep 4, 2012 12:05 PM

Tags: #or #rpm #7200 #5400

Hi Forum,

 

I have a laptop that I intend to use for 1920 - 1080 Blackmagic Motion JPEG footage and have just upgraded my laptop ram to the maximum of 8GB.

 

I have now noticed that my internal hard drive speed is only 5400 RPM and am now wondering if this will be fast enough.

 

Can anyone tell me if It’s worth while for me to upgrade the drive to a 7200 RPM and if so what would be the pros and cons of doing so?

 

My Laptop specs are:

 

Toshiba Satellite A660

i7 CPU 1.73GHz 1733 Mhz Quad core

500 GB Internal 5400 PPM

8 GB Ram

Premiere CS5.5

Win 7 Home Premium.

External Esata 4 TB Raid 0

External 1TB 7200 drive for scratch and exports.

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Rex.

1112 Views   7 Replies   Latest reply: Bill Gehrke, Sep 5, 2012 6:22 AM
 
Replies
  • John T Smith
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    1. John T Smith,
    Sep 4, 2012 1:11 PM   in reply to rexeve
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    Run the CS5 Benchmark http://ppbm5.com/ to see where you need to improve anything

     
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  • Bill Gehrke
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    2. Bill Gehrke,
    Sep 4, 2012 1:50 PM   in reply to rexeve
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    You probably would not see any application performance improvement with an upgrade.  It should affect boot time and application loading time, but that is all.

     

    1. The first problem that I see is your screen resolution does not meet Adobe's minimum vertical resolution of 900 pixels.  You may be able to work around that but it will be inconvenient. 
    2. The second problem is your use of two external devices,  Your external RAID 0 array will be severely hampered by the single eSATA speed.  And I am guessing that your second external drive would have to be connected to a USB 2.0 port which will provide you lousy performance (about 35 MB/s) on that 7200 rpm drive.  Get something like HDtach and measure your disk performances.
    3. You do have an nVidia GT 330M GPU but it only has 48 CUDA cores and an unknown amount ot video RAM.  If it does not have more than 896 MB of RAM it will not work to get the Hardware acceleration with the MPE, and even if it does it is only DDR3 memory which with only 48 cores is not going to help much if any..
    4. I do not know the relative complexity of MJPEG but I suspect it is quite demanding and may be a CPU intensive problem for your i7-820QM processor.  Maybe someone can supply a link to Harm's table of codec complexity's. The good thing about your processor is it is a hyperthreaded quad core CPU. . 
     
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  • JEShort01
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    3. JEShort01,
    Sep 4, 2012 3:50 PM   in reply to Bill Gehrke
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    Bill,

     

    I agree with you on points 1, 3 and 4, but I differ regarding where you suggest an external RAID 0 array would be severely hampered by eSATA speed. He may be missing out on just a tiny bit of hard drive performance when reading or writing to the fastest portion of the RAID, however over most of the drives eSATA is not likely limiting performance at all.

     

    HDTune or HDTach will as you suggest be a good measure, and yes, a USB 2.0 port will seriously limit performance.

     

    Assuming Rex's laptop has a SATA 2 capable eSATA connection and the external RAID 0 device is SATA 2 or 3, the throughput limit would be 3Gigabits/sec or 300 MB/sec and seek speed would be the same as if both drives were connected via separate SATA cables on a motherboard.

     

    Regards,

     

    Jim

     
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  • rexeve
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    4. rexeve,
    Sep 5, 2012 5:09 AM   in reply to JEShort01
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    Thanks very much for your imput.

     

    Im not sure if it makes any diffrence but both extenal drives are connected by eSATA via a 2 port eSATA expresscard (ECESATA22) would this make any diffrence to the point 2 issue above?

     

    Regards.

     

    Rex.

     
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  • JEShort01
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    5. JEShort01,
    Sep 5, 2012 5:27 AM   in reply to rexeve
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    Rex,

     

    Using an expresscard should not make a difference if everything is compatible and set up properly.

     

    Drive speed on a SATA or eSATA controller is a result of the weakest link including: performance of the drive itself, drivers, setup, and firmware in addition to the level of SATA (I, II, III) and compability between all the above!

     

    Test yours and report the results back!

     

    If you download the free HDTune set block size to 2MB (in options) and report back you minimum / maximum / average transfer rates for the RAID 0 external drive. A fast eSATA 4TB external would bench around: 100MB/sec min / 240MB/sec max / 200MB/sec average.

     

    Jim

     
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  • Alan Craven
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    6. Alan Craven,
    Sep 5, 2012 5:57 AM   in reply to rexeve
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    I am successfully editing AVCHD on a Vaio laptop of very similar spec to yours, except that I have a greater screen resolution, which exceeds the Adobe specification.  I replaced the installed 5400 RPM HDD with a 7200 rpm Seagate Momentus XT.  This provides  a very fast boot and rapid opening of applications, and subjectively editing is a smoother process than it was before the change.  I also increased the RAM to 8 GB.

     

    I keep all media on a single external 7200 RPM drive connected by a built-in eSATA port.  If necessary I also have two USB3 ports.  On occasion when trying to do more serious editing I have run with a second 7200 RPM HDD connected via an Express Port eSATA card.

     

    I should add that I do not consider this to be a serious editing system.  I use it for doing basic rough cut editing whilst I am away from home.

     
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  • Bill Gehrke
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    7. Bill Gehrke,
    Sep 5, 2012 6:22 AM   in reply to rexeve
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    rexeve wrote:

     

    Thanks very much for your imput.

     

    Im not sure if it makes any diffrence but both extenal drives are connected by eSATA via a 2 port eSATA expresscard (ECESATA22) would this make any diffrence to the point 2 issue above?

     

    Regards.

     

    Rex.

    That is probably a very good way to do it but, prove it your self by testing, download the free HDTach (for full-disk read speed testing) or try the ATTO disk benchmark for read and write (a sampling test).  Not all eSATA controllers are up to the full specs.  I use HD Tune Pro (paid version)

     
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