bus speed issue

[Cystonic]

I have a 366mhz Clamshell special edition (SE), with a 10 gig loud as hell HD and 320 megs of RAM.

I want to upgrade to a 80GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K80 5400RPM 9.5mm drive. On another post someone said that the clamshell's bus speed might not be enough to take full advantage of the 5400RPM and said I should get a 4200rpm drive instead. anyone know if this bus hinderance is true?

Thanks

Cystonic

 

[Zammy-Sam]

Well, I think this it is true that you won't get the FULL advantage of this disc.
Benchmarks have shown, that the same disc performs not significantly but at least slightly better when it is for example on ATA100 instead of ATA66. But there is also another point:
Even if your bus speed would be at ATA33 meaning 33mb/sec bandwidth (which is the slowest UDMA mode I know), your 5400rpm Travelstar won't make it. It makes sense when you have two discs at the same ide-port which is not given in your case. Here one example: my Fujitsu 60gb harddisc with 4200rpm (I believe) can write with around 15mb/sec and read with something more than 20mb/sec. My 7200rpm ibm deskstar is at 35mb/sec writing and 40mb/sec reading. I think your disc would be somewhere below the middle. This means below the 33mb/sec threshold. So, in terms of bandwidth it shouldn't matter. But somehow there are still some benefits in those faster ATAs.
But since you are looking for a laptop harddisc, I would suggest to go for 4200rpm since they are more silent and producing less heat. Probably they are cheaper as well...