Hard drive speed
- Started
- Last post
- 9 Responses
- mirrorball
Is there a way of seeing what speed your internal and external hard drives are spinning at.
Need to find out which one is spinning the fastest to use a scratch disk for Photoshop
- akrok0
two ways...
A. open the box, look at the HD label.
B. menubar > apple > about this mac > more info > serial-ata ....copy model number and do a search for it, on the web.
- doesnotexist0
get something like this
- ETM0
Generally speaking, regardless of spec, I would make the scratch drive separate from the drive the app is running off of, both Mac or PC.
- akrok0
yes, what etm said.
best to have two internal and use the 2nd one as scratch disk.
- kalkal0
Don't use an external drive for this unless it's either USB 3 or Thunderbolt, it will be too slow.
- This is true. I missed the 'external' part on the original post.ETM
- will have to use thunderbolt and wait then. No us 3.0 in the macbook pros
mirrorball
- kalkal0
Although the spinning speed can make a difference, usb 2.0 will max out at about 30MB/s
Spinning speed also doesn't always mean the drive will be slower or faster, for example a 2.5" 1TB drive spinning at 5400rpm can be faster than a 3.5" drive spinning at 7200rpm because of a higher density. The seek time is lower because the read head has to travel less.
Use a benchmark to get a good idea as to which drive is faster. I would suggest that if your 2nd drive is much slower than your primary drive, do in fact use your primary drive. Assuming you have a lot of RAM it would be idle for the most part either way due to the redundancy of the swap file.
- mirrorball0
got a new macbook pro, thinking of replacing the boot drive, a 500gb hard drive for a 128gb SSD boot drive. Another SSD installed in place of the DVD drive bay for my scratch disk and sing the 500gb drive that came with the mac as my file drive.
- i think you need a frame, or what it's called. to make the HD works where the DVD is.akrok
- Weyland0
Fragmentation can be an issue too when trying to stream files at maximum speed, yes, I know OSX 'handles that for you' but I'd suggest looking into it for large files.