From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1RKoVs-0000OL-5K for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:50:40 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 662AA21C07B; Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:50:31 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-yw0-f53.google.com (mail-yw0-f53.google.com [209.85.213.53]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C7FA421C03A for ; Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:49:36 +0000 (UTC) Received: by ywe9 with SMTP id 9so6683758ywe.40 for ; Mon, 31 Oct 2011 02:49:36 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=mime-version:in-reply-to:references:from:date:message-id:subject:to :content-type:content-transfer-encoding; bh=Y4fE1bsySxHDyhhBcARPXmuw+1wk/IP8bb3/VCvqZO4=; b=S0/lpn/0+DpSY+XeL2dSXtDaHwcZ44DgrJ3XkIEbfFPFLNaKU/+YrPz76lzyNhAkIr wagOuj93T/hMMCMVZve3TtJkNh4PgA4hbvSHwx2ksPjNrj4QcmGrT7jR1uT9ZdsMegAK MyshipBuzeHU2iwlCFSIJBsH+5kX2U9p9BCB0= Received: by 10.42.151.4 with SMTP id c4mr21295600icw.39.1320054576077; Mon, 31 Oct 2011 02:49:36 -0700 (PDT) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.42.179.7 with HTTP; Mon, 31 Oct 2011 02:49:15 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <4EA9130A.6070807@gmail.com> References: <4EA9130A.6070807@gmail.com> From: James Broadhead Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:49:15 +0000 Message-ID: Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive RPMs and data speed. To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Archives-Salt: 827e4ae7-e831-451f-a83c-9c1b5b1085dc X-Archives-Hash: 45fe5c23e2722c1569d832907b40c27d On 27 October 2011 09:15, Dale wrote: > Howdy, > > I'm wanting to get a hard drive that is pretty good size. =C2=A0I'm looki= ng for > about 1 to 2TBs or so. =C2=A0Thing is, a lot of them seem to be 5900 or e= ven 5400 > rpm drives. =C2=A0I realize that the data on there is packed pretty tight= so I > want to ask a few people that may have one or more of these things a few > questions. =C2=A0Are they as fast as a slower RPM drive? =C2=A0Would they= be fast > enough to play HD videos and such? =C2=A0I have quite a few 1080 HD video= s. =C2=A0I > don't want the drive to cause issues. Ignoring your question somewhat, since the hdparm test won't actually get you 'effective' throughput, only 'ideal'. ( (4.4*1024*1024*1024) / (120*60) ) / 1024 640.796 So a 4.4GiB movie that lasts 2 hours would require a sustained drive throughput of 640KiB/s - which is pretty achievable. My experience says that it doesn't matter how slow a drive you use, provided that you beef up mplayer's cache size and minimum cache threshold, since my laptop has a slow drive that likes to power down, but loads of RAM. >> grep cache /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf # cache settings # Use 8MB input cache by default. cache =3D 131072 # Prefill 20% of the cache before starting playback. cache-min =3D 20.0 # Prefill 50% of the cache before restarting playback after the cache empti= ed. cache-seek-min =3D 50