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EX7 -- SATA or PATA

post #1 of 10
9/11/06 at 11:28am
Thread Starter 
Hi.. I'm starting to look for options to replace the Hard Drives I have in my EX7, and I'm wondering what would be the best, SATA Drives? PATA Drives? Does it really affect performance on this small drives if it is 7200 or 5400 RPM? I'm using them on RAID 0, If I go for 5400 RPM I can get almost 320 GB, but if I choose SATA and 7200 RPM I can only get 160 BG, I could not find anything bigger than 80GB on this format. Any recommendation?

Thanks!!
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post #2 of 10
9/11/06 at 11:35am
SATA is faster, I would rather have smaller 7200 RPM drives then larger slower drives (but that could just be me). I store most of my data on other PCs (i.e. file servers) around the house, hence only an 80 GB in my laptop. SATA is a must, but rotation speed and size are a personal choice.
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post #3 of 10
9/11/06 at 5:56pm
Thread Starter 
I just ordered two 100GB 7200 RPM SATA drives for my EX7, but they are backordered, so I have to wait like 2 weeks... hope did not change later to two months :-)
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post #4 of 10
9/11/06 at 6:02pm
Going from 5400rpm to 7200rpm is much more important than the actual interface. In fact, in notebooks, PATA vs SATA is pretty much equivalent so either option would work.
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post #5 of 10
9/14/06 at 3:47pm
PATA and SATA drive interfaces really don't matter unless you are running RAID0 (Two drives acting like a single big drive to the OS) or RAID1 (mirroring). PATA has a BUS of 133Mbps while SATA is 150Mbps. Most harddrives phyically max out at 70-80Mbps transfer. This is a limitation of the HD architecture itself.

I can say that in a straight up configure (no RAID) a 7200 RPM HD is faster than the 5400 RPM HD. I had purchased a 80G 5400 RPM HD with my system due to budget reasons, thinking I could always addon/upgrade later. I recently purchased an 80G 7200 RPM HD and imaged my data over.

My boot times are listed here:

5400 RPM Primary: ~52 sec. from power button to XP desktop.
7200 RPM Primary: ~35 sec. from power button to XP desktop.

As a test I fdisked the drives and then set them up as RAID0 and got the boot time to ~26 sec. Am back to the 7200 as Primary and the 5400 as Secondary and am loving life.

Other specs for Lappy are 64 X2 3800+, 2G RAM, 256M Go 7800GTX, Aviator FX-7.

Side note, am curious to see my boot times with an FX60 processor now that they are done in price. Still a couple months away from getting that tho.
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post #6 of 10
9/14/06 at 4:08pm
Thread Starter 
Any reason you went baco to a non RAID config when the RAID was faster?
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post #7 of 10
9/14/06 at 4:43pm
Yes, I want to have a dual OS with the second HD having a Linux partition.
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post #8 of 10
9/14/06 at 5:24pm
Thread Starter 
I'll be courious if you don't mind, what apps are you running in Linux.. did you find all the drivers for the laptop?
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post #9 of 10
9/14/06 at 5:30pm
If you look in the Support section, you will find I haven't gotten what I want working yet, but I did get the desktop version of Ubuntu working on it and everything seemed fine, I did have to update the nVidia set and modify a couple files to allow for 1920x1200 resolution, but it did work. As far as apps go, it will mainly be stock apps and VI/text editors for programming and network troubleshooting when needed. The Lappy is mostly for gaming right now but should I need to get to my linux tools, I would like to have them available when I'm 3 floors up from my desktop.
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post #10 of 10
9/17/06 at 10:58am
I don't think there's a speed difference with the PATA and SATA drives. They are simply too slow to take advantage of the increased bus speed of the SATA interface. Perhaps the cache bursts might be a little faster on the SATA, but it's probably not noticable.

As far as the linux stuff goes, the FX7 is pretty much fully supported. The only thing I can't get working is the webcam. The EX7 should work perfectly fine out of the box in ubuntu.
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