Does anyone know if there's a difference between the drive speed of the 320GB and the 1TB drives in the iMac? I'm leaning towards the larger on-board drive...given that I have several TB of lossless music, video, etc. Obviously, I'll still need to run from some external drives, but I'd like to keep as much music as possible on-board.
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HD Speed - 1TB in 24 iMac
- Thread starter hukuma
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- All ALU iMacs have 3 Gbit/sec internal SATA interfaces.
- Even the 1.5 Gbit/sec SATA in older iMacs is faster than the
fastest/most modern high-capacity drives (i.e., 500 GB and up),
and much faster than any USB or firewire external drive.
To the OP: internal drive speed is a crap-shoot. There's no telling
which make/model you'll get with a new iMac. It's a safe bet that
it'll be something reasonably fast (in the 80 MByte/sec ballpark),
but probably not the latest super-fast (> 100 Mbyte/sec) models.
Also be aware that a modern drive's "maximum R/W transfer rate"
applies only to the outer tracks. The speed drops by about 50% for
the inner tracks -- so, any given drive is about twice as fast when
nearly empty as when nearly full.
LK
Thank you
OK...thank you for the information. Looks like there isn't a downside to taking on the 1TB drive!
OK...thank you for the information. Looks like there isn't a downside to taking on the 1TB drive!
Where did you get that information? According to System Profiler, my 24" iMac has the following in it
To answer the OP's question, I have the 1TB drive in and it seems plenty fast - it's a Hitachi HDS721010KLA330, which is a 7,200RPM drive with 32MB cache, 8.5ms seek time and has a 300MB/S (3.0 Gigabit) interface
