is the 250gb WD pata drive faster than the Travelstar 100gb 7200?

[California]

Does anyone know if the Western Digital 250gb 5400rpm p-ata hard drive is faster than the supposed fastest Travelstar 100gb 7200 rpm Hitachi p-ata laptop hard drive?

From a comparison off two Bare Feats charts -- one on the p ata Seagate Momentus vs the Travelstar 100gb 7200 drives

and the SATA Western Digital laptop drive 250gb, it seems the W D is faster than the 100 gb drives.

Does anyone know for sure, though? Might be nice to max out my ibook, mac mini or powerbook with the largest fastest p ata drive I can get as they seem to be phasing these drives out.

 

[zioxide]

SATA and PATA don't really make a difference for notebook drives, so the PATA model probably gets the same speeds as the SATA version.

 

[tmoney468]

Their speeds are probably similar, but the 7200 drive would probably be a little fast for harddrive-intensive tasks, but the 250GB has the advantage of having a higher platter density, so that would also speed up the 250GB drive.

 

[smcpartlin]

I use the Hitachi 7200's

I've used the Hitachi 7200 notebook drives to upgrade some of my users that complain their laptop is slow. They work pretty well. I would guess users feel there laptops are about 10% faster afterwords. But note that battery life does suffer.. plus the notebook will get hotter..

So maybe the WD might eat less battery while still beating the pants out of your tipical 4200rpm drive. I'll stick with the 7200 till something better comes out...

Now if money is no object look at the 32gb SDD drive from seagate. That's one fast drive.. but still only 32gb. I will invest if they can come out with a 64gb model. That's about all your tipical user needs. Low battery use.. no noise, little heat and very fast. But at 500.00 it's pretty expensive.

The hybrid 5400rmp drives are comming out now.. maybe good for vista... don't know yet. But I'll wait for faster versions of that to come out...

Since this is a mac forum I also will note I have no idea if MAC OS will do anything with the hyprid drives yet.