Apple is still lumbering iMacs with 5400 RPM hard drives

Aren’t Ferraris notorious for having bad electrical systems? I’d rather have the wind down windows too, if I had to have a Ferrari.

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I was going to post the same thing about the speed mattering at one point. Obviously those days are long gone for most home computers but Apple for some reason still stupidly uses spinners…and the worst spinners ta boot.

I recently built a small gaming PC for myself and the only drive it has is an M2 on the front of the board. I have a second M2 slot on the back, but the 500gb one I got works perfectly for gaming.

I still store the majority of my stuff on an external ssd and the old spinner drive on my 2010 iMac (which serves as my browsing/email/design machine as well as a monitor for the gaming box).

I notice acutely how slow it is compared to the M2 drive. ACUTELY.

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These models were made especially to be sold to teams fot GT championships. For some categories the car has to be derived from a street-legal one, and some have to be done in a car that passed the roadworthiness test.
The upholstery will be replaced anyway, so why mess with pieces that will be thrown away and wires that will be cut?

If you look to “normal” cars you will find that the version with the most powerful engine doesn’t have all the optionals like the lower powered ones, for the same reason.

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Yeah. After using Mac since the 512ke, I gave up this year and built myself a PC for office use. With an AMD APU, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB ssd, I came in at just over $300, including a gray-market Windows 10 license.

Windows 10 is not nearly as bad as internet griping would have you believe.

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I have been mildly happy with WIN10. I still find MacOS more simplified and self sufficient which I prefer…but 10 has definitely caught up in terms of easier/better UI and some quality of life things.

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What do you have against anthracite? Don’t tell me you’re one of those Lignite lovers? I wouldn’t dirty my steam engine with that stuff.

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To add to what @jandrese said, rotational speed of a drive does effect its performance. There are two important aspects to the performance of a storage device (primary ones at least). Those are sequential transfer speed and latency. The speed you refer to is the sequential transfer speed. That’s useful for reading/writing large files. The other is latency. That’s the amount of time before requesting an operation and when the data transfer can actually begin.

Rotational speed directly effects both of these values. For a given aerial density, a faster rotational speed linearly increases the transfer rate of the drive. It also decreases a portion of the latency. Latency is composed of a rotational component–how long it takes for the desired location to rotate to where the heads are–and a motional latency–how long it takes the heads to move to the right radial position along the disc surface. The latter is pretty much set by the technology used in the drive, but the rotational part is set by the rotational speed of the drive.

Laptop drives typically come in speeds of 5400 or 7200 RPM. In the same 2.5" form factor you can get 10K drives, but they’re not meant for desktop use–they’re quite noisy and use a lot of power. Both the 5400 and 7200 come in a full range of capacities, so there’s no reason Apple couldn’t have chosen a 7200 RPM drive for this application.

Solid State Drives (SSDs) gain most of their performance benefit from decreacing the latency of operations. While a rotational hard drive can take, say 10ms to access a random location, a SSD can take 10us. They also tend to have faster transfer rates as well ( A good HD can do 200MB/s while all but the bargin bin SSDs can max out the SATA bus at 550MB/s). If you move to faster interfaces such a PCI-E (as used on an M.2 drive), the latency can decrease by another order of magnitude and transfer rates can top out just below 4GB/s.

A cheap 1TB 5400 RPM laptop type drive goes for around $40. A 7200 RPM drive adds $10 to $15 to that. A cheap 1TB M.2 SSD can go for $100 (or close to). That’s a trivial difference in cost for a huge performance difference.

It’s downright irresponsible to sell an expensive device like these iMacs with a spinning drive in them. As @Jim_Campbell mentioned, the useability difference between those two storage types is huge. Given how hard it is to swap storage on iMacs, I doubt it’s that Apple is hoping you’ll come back for an upgrade a few years down the road when you realize how much your spinning drive is holding your machine back.

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I want the sounds of a 14.4kbps modem back.

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“Upgrade” to an iMac meaning you buy a whole new one. Apple doesn’t do upgrades. Although why you would be inclined to buy a new one after the suffering through the dog turd slowness of your current one for two years is a mystery.

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56k modem sounds were more interesting. You got the fun warbles near the end.

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A 5400 RPM drive can be of very high quality. What it isn’t is fast. The rate at which the read head encounters bits is determined by two factors, the spin speed and the bit density. Since little has changed in bit density over the last couple of years, the spin rate is what most people use these days to gauge how fast a given HDD is going to be. While it isn’t a perfect metric, it is a handy one.

That’s what the plebs get for buying the mid-range iMac. Pull up your bootstraps and buy the high end version!

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RPM can be a rough indicator of IOPs (input / output operations per second), the 5400 RPM class of drives being about 57 IOPs and 15000 RPM drives being around 165.

The very low end WD drive cited is > 80,000 IOPs. It does slow down considerably as it fills up, and, filled up could end up running slower than the spinning rust drive. For $135 you can get the Crucial MX500, which benchmarks much better, or $149 for a Samsung EVO series, which most SSDs are compared against.

Let’s say that Apple is including a good $61 WD Red 5400 RPM drive, the difference for an excellent Samsung EVO SSD is only $87. The out-of-the-box experience for a possible first time Apple user should be a no-brainer.

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he’s talking about the “quality” of the user experience, which will suck when you have to wait for a 5400rpm drive to spin up to do disc reads, and pause to load apps when you launch them etc…

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27tguj

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C’mon 33 posts and not a single Apple fan Applesplaining to us plebs how we simply don’t understand the Genius that is the Apple design ethos of overpriced, inferior parts coupled with a complete lack of serviceablity, and a really nice display.

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Good point, agreed. I wasn’t aware that Apple doesn’t upgrade stuff. I don’t buy their stuff.

They used to be better about it. I have an old Macbook where the hard drive and memory were accessible by just removing the battery. Anybody could replace them in less than a couple of minutes. The quest for thinness over the past 10-15 years has eradicated that and now most stuff is soldered to the motherboard, or access involves breaking enormous glue joints around the entire case with surgical precision.

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I seem to recall (aeons ago) that 7200 was preferred for video editing. This WAS a very long time ago, though.

That are just the contacts. A wirebrush does wonders (tested on a '77 308). The F40 does not have manual windows in that sense though, it has only a small quarter of the window that you can slide back.