I just bought an external hard drive that was installed in one of those firewire/usb cases and was told that it is a 7200 rpm drive which is what I need for audio recording.
However I am having some serious doubts that it is actually an 7200rpm drive.
I took a look in About this Mac but the system profile does not seem to show that or I just don't exactly were to look.
Is there a software I can use to ascertain the speed of that external drive and even my internal hard drives?
Or, do I have to dismantle the case it was installed in to read the specs that may be printed/posted on the drive?
How? Ascertaining hard drive speeds?
Moderator: James Steele
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zerosin
Download the demo of this http://fwb.com/html/drivetest.html. Spindle speed is important but see what the drive can do before worrying about that. With external FireWire drives, the processor speed is very important too. I just installed a SATA card in a friend's G4 466 and two 80GB 7200RPM SATA drives. Then I striped them RAID 0. Very fast right? Well I benched marked my system's drive (basically a 1.2GHz G4 Cube with one ATA100 7200 RPM Barracuda on an ATA66 bus) and then bench marked his performance. His was barely a tick faster than mine and seemed to have a cap on its performance. This is the processor speed; IDE needs the system processor too and my processor is much faster than his. My external FireWire drive is only a tick slower than my internal under 10.4.2. Before that it was about half the speed of my internal. So there seems to be some OS software effect too.
Don't sweat the numbers on the paper, see what it can really do.
Don't sweat the numbers on the paper, see what it can really do.