[geeks] Advice on buying a new Mac

[Mike F]

Mark Benson wrote:
> On 14 Nov 2006, at 03:11, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
>
>   
[snip]
>> 1.  they optimize for ruggedness and low power consumption
>>     
>
> Which makes them slower perhaps? They are much more economical anyway  
> due to their reduced size, but also I think they have other powersave  
> features. IBM Travelstars used to have that annoying tick that  
> happened every 2-5mins which was something to do with powersaving,  
> and lead to lag picking the heads up again. Smaller platters do  
> however reduce inertia meaning if the drive stops to save power it  
> spins back up faster.
>   
I don't know about the current generation of Mac Mini, but the internal
drive in my G4 Mini behaves exactly that way, except the tick was much
more often and it would frequently happen just as the disk was being
accessed. I know a lot of laptop drives do that, but I never really knew
what it was. However, it annoyed me enough (not so much the sound as the
excruciating pauses) to put a 3.5" drive in a firewire enclosure and use
that as the primary drive. No more "tick" and much better overall
responsiveness.

- Mike