Hard Drive Speed and PS2

Hey all-

I recently built a desktop PC with two hard drives. I have a small 7200 rpm for actual processing and a

5400 rpm drive for storage. I'm ready to purchase a new dell notebook and am wondering

if anyone knows just how much faster a 7200 rpm drive processes PS2 files vs. a 5400 drive.

Is it worth the extra $50-$100?

Thanks for all of your help. I got some great tips in my last thread about new notebooks.

Chris

With the only difference being drive speed, you'll only notice any performance differences in the following scenarios:

1) When you open the files

2) When you save the files to disk

3) If you've managed to use up all of your memory (RAM) and you're "swapping to disk" (e.g., you're using your hard disk as backup RAM).

I'd wager that #1 and #2 aren't really what you're talking about since you're referring to the actually processing of the images themselves. This will only happen after you've opened the images up (and thus they're stored in memory and manipulated there). Only after that's done do you use the disk again when you save the final image. So that will add a bit of overhead to the workflow, but not much, probably.

As for #3, if you're swapping to disk because you're running out of RAM, then you have bigger issues to deal with than a slow disk. Swapping to disk is slow - regardless of your disk speed. If you find that you're doing it frequently, then you need to seriously consider increasing your memory or limiting what's running on your computer during image processing to free up memory for your image workflow process.

All-in-all, I doubt you'll see much difference between the two during the actual workflow. You may be able to see some difference when you're dumping 4G of images from your memory card to your disk - but it's certainly possible that the bottleneck will be the USB connection or memory card - not your hard drive.

It's also important to note that the slower disks tend to be better on batter life and last longer (they have a larger MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) - if those are considerations for you.