Microdrives: Seagate ST1 vs. Hitachi

[dfintak]

Which drive is more efficient? I want to maximize battery efficiency while watching movies and was wondering if anyone has done tests on both of these drives. I currently have a 3k4 Hitachi drive, but wonder if I should return it and get a 5gb Seagate ST1 drive. I'm not sure if the 2gb cache (compared with 128mb on the hitachi) will correlate with substantially improved battery life. Thanks for your input.

[Dulmit]

The IBM should use less energy. With 2 mb cache the drive will spin less often thus using less energy. this does assume that drive motor efficiency is equal in the drives. Should also be faster since there should be fewer page faults going to the drive that will not be picked up by the cache, chip memory much faster transfer than disk memory.
The IBM drive with 2mb cache sounds exceptionaly large, make sure to check that fact.

[Dulmit]

Forgot to mention that this will be less energy, but might not equal substantial energy savings

[XandeR803]

Actually I'm pretty sure it's the seagate that has the 2mb cache. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

The Seagate does have the higher amount of cache on the drive, but I don't expect you'd see any substantial energy savings. The problem will always come down to the fact that you're spinning up the drive; yes, the extra cache will let you handle read/write operations somewhat more efficiently, although it'll affect the write part more than the read part (more cache RAM means that you're better able to cope with high-RPM drives and read/write operations, although this is more slanted towards writing than reading). However, in normal usage, I wouldn't expect it to make that big a difference - your system will (if you're smart) cache a lot of data into RAM anyways. The 2MB of cache RAM is more useful in digital camera applications, where you're writing a lot of data, and having the ability to queue up the write operations on the drive means that you're able to save large megapixel photos that much more quickly.

[Lofty]

The Hitachi drive has 128 kb of cache and Seagates drive has 2 MB of cache. I have a retail 4 GB Hitachi Microdrive and a 5 GB Seagate ST1 drive I pulled from my RIO Carbon.

I really dont notice any difference in batter compsumption. I only use it for music and video and I have the media players cache the files into RAM. I also dont notice any performance difference while in the Pocket PC. But taken out of my Pocket PC and connected to my USB 2.0 reader with my main PC and I notice the Seagate drive is much quicker at reading and writing.

I would however recommend neither, I recommend you get a Seagate ST2 drive. 4 GB and 8 GB Segate ST2 microdrives were just released and these Seagate drives are actually retail. The cheapest I found them going for was $115 for the 4 GB and $200 for the 8 GB drive. I would expect these new drives from Seagate perform just as well as the ST1 drives do.

[dfintak]

Thanks for the replies. I think I'm going to stick with the Hitachi drive since I got it at such a steal (and since I found out its the 3k6 instead of the 3k4). Glad to hear that the extra cache doesn't equate to a substantial energy savings. By the way, anyone know how I can get my axim to stop "forgetting" that my CF/MD is inserted? I have to do a soft reset almost daily to have it recognized again (running A01 ROM). Thanks