I was lucky to get a new 500 Gb portable hard drive for Christmas.  It was one of the Western Digital Passport series, a very small USB drive.  I already had 4 of these, 2 with 160 Gb, 1 at 250 Gb and 1 at 320 Gb.  One might think it all adds up to a lot of giga-bytes, but with hard drives, the larger capacity are much more useful than multiple drives that add up to that capacity.

Also laying on my desk are 3 different 2.5 in bare drives that have been removed from various notebook computers, 1 at 160 Gb, and 2 at 100 Gb.  I have an external dock I can plug these into, but what do I use them for?  They are too small to hold an image of my current Mac Book Pro hard drive.  It becomes a bother to split backups over multiple drives.  So they just kind of sit there, like paper weights.

I also have a 3.5 in, 500 GB bare drive sitting next to them.  It failed awhile ago.  It is still under warranty so I need to send it back to Maxtor to get a replacement, but I have not got around to it.  I guess I just have drives coming out the Ying Yang.

My new minimum sizes:

2.5 in drive – 500 Gb
3.5 in drive – 1 Tb

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In a prior blog entry I discussed swapping the internal drive on my MacBook Pro and how it’s performance improved.  I decided to run the same benchmark on several different external drives I have.  To keep the comparision simple, I will show graphs for only one parameter, random write.  I used Drive Genius 2 to do the benchmarking.

Internal Drive

First to repeat my internal drive performance.

Western Digital, 2.5 in, 7200 rpm, 16 mb cache, SATA II

Segate 500 Gb in my own FW 800 case

This provides the overall best performance (green bars).  The blue bars are the stock Macbook Pro hard drive.

Now for the external hard drives, listed with the best performer first.

Firewire 800 Connection

SIIG External Firewire 800 case where I installed my own Segate, 500 Gb, PATA drive

Next is Maxtor One Touch III, 500 Gb, with a Firewire 800 interface.  Note that I have had issues using these drives on a Mac and ended up tearing apart a 750 Gb since the interface no longer worked.

The my latest purchase, a Western Digital Studio Editon, 1 Tb drive, with Firewire 800.

USB 2.0 Connection

Segate 750 Gb, SATA II, 7200 rpm drive inserted in a Thermalake USB 2.0 dock.

And finally a Western Digital, 250 Gb, Passport, 2.5 in. 5400 rpm drive.

When I get a eSATA card for my computer I can do some further testing.  Many of my drives also support Firewire 400 so I could test that, but this is enough for now.

My conclusion is that Firewire 800 is a very good interface for an external drive, much faster than USB 2.0.  The difference is far more significant than one would expect considering the theoretical difference in transfer rate is 800 vs. 480.  For 3.5 in drives on FW800, the random write was more like 4 times faster than when using USB, at least in the dock I have.

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I just finished replacing the hard drive in my Mac Book Pro.  Unlike most notebook computers, this was not an easy task.  I had to remove 25 screws, remove the keyboard and disconnect two ribbon cables from the mother board before I could remove the old hard drive.  Fortunately there are many good tutorials on the web to follow. I used a video tutorial at Other World Computing.

My model came two years ago with a 160 Gb drive.  It was just plain out of space, especially after taking all the photos in Europe recently.  Although I find the Mac must better in terms of applications using disk space, the documents, music and photos all add up.

I decided to go with a 7200 rpm drive, instead of the traditional 5400 rpm.  That meant I would only get a 320 Gb drive, instead of 500 Gb.  I bought the Western Digital drive online at newegg.com for $99, plus tax. Shipping was free.  I arrived late in the day.

I put the new drive in my external hard drive dock.  This is a cool device that holds either a 3.5 or 2.5 bare SATA hard drive.  I ran SuperDuper to clone the existing drive to the new drive so once installed it would boot right up.  Since this external doc is only USB 2, it took awhile, 5 hours in fact.  It was now 11 pm and I was wonder if I should start this project.  Of course I could not resist.

I put a piece of paper on the desk and wrote down where all the screws were coming from and place the screws there as I removed them.  When I finally was removing the keyboard, the ribbon cable came disconnected before I could look underneath to see where it was attached, which gave me a bit of a startle. But I finally figured it out.

After the old drive was removed and the new on installed, and all the screws put back, I turned the computer on.  It seemed to not start and I was now worried.  But I guess it was just trying to figure out what to boot from since it had a new hard drive and shortly it started up.

I am very happy with the performance.  It seems to be a much faster computing experience.  The increase in performace could be from the faster hear drive, the larger hard drive with high density or the fact that I have much more free disk space.  In any case I am glad I went with a faster hard drive.  Only by testing a 5400 rpm 500 Gb drive compared with what I installed would one really know the best solution.

I did some benchmarking of the new drive compared with the what the database for the MacBook Pro.  The graphs below show how the new drive (in green) compare with what the baseline was for a MacBook Pro.  I included graphs for both random read and random write.  It seems the 7200 rpm does make a significant difference.  Click the graphs to view enlarged.

Internal 320 Gb 7200 RPM - Random Read

Internal 320 Gb 7200 RPM - Random Write

Just looking at the specifications, my new internal 7200 rpm drive takes no more power, has any more vibration or a higher noise level, compared with the Western Digital 5200 rpm drive.

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