I post this with permission of the author who posted it in another forum but tells me he will be here to visit us
Re: Which Hard Drive for Tyros 2?

Hello,

If audio recording is not important nearly all 2.5"drives will be suitable.
If audio recording is important certainly you might expect problems with cheap or older 2.5" drives like 4200 RPM, 1MB buffer memory and low transfer speed.
Its not particular the HDD drive speed that makes the difference. But compare the most improtant specs, if audio.
The main specs that are relevant for Audio Recording
Listed for a top model Toshiba 5200 RPM and others
- Average Access Time < 12 mSec
- Max Transfer Speed, 100 MByte/second (ATA5 or ATA6) interface
- Buffer Memory 8 or preferably 16 MB

A top model 2.5"HDD with 7200 RPM only benefits a slightly lower Average Access Time of around 10.5 mSec. and is currently very expensive 60GB = 2000 Euro.

For streaming audio particular Buffer memory and Transfer Speed are important.
Above spec's of hte 5200 RPM of current HDD's will likely be more than suitable.

But I can imagine a very cheap or older model 2.5" HDD with 5200 RPM and 1 MB Buffer memory and older ATA spec interface with low Transfer speed might cause you trouble, causing Audio signals transfer to be interupted. But practice will learn us.
May be Yamaha Support specialists are able to do some test with different models.

Cheers JaapV (NL)

Posted here by BEBOP

7200 rpm is overkill. Check out the bottom of this page: http://aux.music.yamaha.com/tyros2/spec/index.html

It shows all the drives that Yamaha have tested and certified under lab condition. They are all 5400rpm drives.

I would recommend getting one of these. 7200rpm will mean more noise, more heat, more vibration, and the one millisecond advantage in seek time is definitely not worth it.

I checked the Yamaha spec and they appear to use 2.5” drives as used in laptop computers, the most common speed at present being 5400rpm, (Although in 12 months or so it will probably be 7200rpm) and are used to give a balance between battery life and performance, As you will be running the drive off a mains feed you can go for as fast a drive as you like.
The big advantage for a faster drive is the significant decrease in the time taken to read and write to the drive. (The seek speed has no relevance to spin speed, in fact some slower drives have a faster seek time then some faster drives)
Hope this helps in your decision.

Bill