>I had thought about getting a 7,200 RPM drive replacement myself, but >someone told me it would give it much less battery life. I know the >R3000s aren't super portables, but I do manage to get a couple of hours >out of mine, generally enough to be useful in airports and such. > >Have you noticed a big drop in run time on battery using a 7K drive?
I think it would be a wise choice to get the 7200 RPM drive. I was concerned about it reducing battery time but it didn't make a noticeable difference (though I'm not a huge user of the battery ... mostly just on planes and when the power cuts out). I looked into the issue before I bought the drive and the theory out there was this: you spin it faster, which takes more energy, but it accesses the data more quickly so you don't spend as much time spinning the drive. I'd say lag declined by about 50% (I didn't perform any benchmarks) but I don't think the drive increases energy consumption by 50% so it might even be more efficient than a 5400 or 4200 RPM drive. Tom's Hardware had some good reviews of the 7k series that dealt with some of these issues. Battery consumption might be more of an issue if you regularly make your drive thrash but most people are working largely out of memory most of the time. If you haven't gone up to 1GB you might consider doing that at the same time, a reduced need to use the swap partition will save you some watts. _______________________________________________ LinuxR3000 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pcxperience.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 Wiki at http://prinsig.se/weekee/
