5400rpm vs. 7200rpm effect ?

hi

i'm interested in hp dv6 6080..
in fact i will looking for 6070 cuz it has a 7200rpm hard desk.. but i only found 6080 in the local stores in my town
so i was wondering how much difference is it between them?
and is it only affect copying and moving files ? or it will affect all the programs and games ?

i will use it for Autocad, Sap2000, Premavira and heavy games


thnx in advance

 

Not huge; marginal at best. Need to factor in data density as well.

SSD is the real upgrade.

 

It is not marginal. It will give you noticeable increase in performance. You will feel that your laptop is more responsive...

You can always upgrade anytime later. There is a new Hitachi 7K750 drive out there which seems to be the best 7200rpm drive in the market now.


--

 

I looked at the specs for he 7k750 but the seek time seemed a bit high.

 

500GB WD black or 750GB WD black

 

Just upgraded from 5400 Hitachi 80GB to 7200 WD Scorpio Black, 320GB. I can definitely say that there is a VERY noticable performance increase.

Granted, I also did a clean install of everything and that has a lot to do with it. But it should also be noted that I am fastidious with all of my computers and so a very significant portion of the performance increase comes from this much faster drive.

I considered SSD, but at $180 minimum for a decent sized 128GB drive it just wasn't worth it. The WD I got was $52 OTD at Amazon.

This is especially considering that I have to run XP (required for work) and that this is an old Dell D520 with a Core Duo T1300.

Since you do heavy games 7200 is best for you unless you have the money to buy a big SSD. For gamers 128GB goes very fast. You will be best served with 256GB SSD, and that is very expesive.

 

The massive increase in density will have helped also.

 

Higher RPM drives reduce seek times substantially. For an individual file, it's nothing, but when you're booting or loading a program that references lots of files, it will be noticeable. Higher RPM drives also generally have higher data transfer rates. However, they also suck down power to achieve both of those feats. 5400 RPM drives are usually the best choice for large files on large TB-sized drives in balancing performance with power and density.

 

Traditionally, you can expect to see about a 10% - 15% performance difference in real-world performance between a 5400rpm vs 7200rpm drive. This performance difference affects anything you do with a "load time".... booting your OS, running applications, running games.

You will also see an improvement when copying a high number of small files. But I would recommend against buying a new hard drive solely for the purpose of faster file copies.

If you're looking to buy a drive for the purpose of a performance boost, I would seriously consider skipping a 7200rpm drive, and getting an SSD instead. In the grand scheme of things, going from 5400rpm --> 7200rpm drive is a marginal performance boost. However, going from a 5400rpm --> SSD will get you performance boosts that will be at a minimum in the range of 100% - 200% improvement.

 

When comparing HDD's, it is not the spec's that matter: it is the specific device/manufacturer and manufacturer's vision for their products that make one 'better' or worse than another for an O/S and program drive.

Just because it says 7200 RPM does not a fast HDD make (Seagate 7200.4 series product was garbage, for example - when speaking of 'performance').

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...ba-mk3252gsx-vs-hitachi-7k500-real-world.html


The improvements I saw were closer to 40% with every upgrade I did from one HDD generation to the next (sometimes, in a few short months) as the link shows. Sometimes, even from one 7200RPM HDD to another (newer) model (The Seagate XT Hybrid, for example).

The fastest current HDD that I have personally used is the Scorpio Black 750GB model (other (lower capacity) models don't compare).

The fastest current HDD that I have not tested but know about is the Hitachi 7K750 (Hitachi being my personal favorite HDD for the best balance of power consumption (often lower than 5400 RPM drives...), heat output, O/S and program performance and price).

While an SSD is many times faster in synthetic benchmarks, as noted they currently fail dramatically when the needs of high capacity storage are taken into account (for a specific price point). Unless the system you're considering is capable of dual HDD's - which would make it an ideal candidite for an SSD (boot/OS/program drive) and HDD (DATA) setup.

Hope some of this information helps.

Good luck.

 

Upgraded with Hitachi 320 7200, not revolutionary, but noticeably faster & very worth the upgrade. No noise or heat problems.

 

Hitachi 7K750 is definitely worth it. See my benchmarks in my sig.

 

The storage drive, even if you have an SSD, is the slowest part of your computer relative to the processor, graphics card, etc. Therefore any increase in speed will be noticeable. There is a large improvement in performance coming from a 5400RPM drive to a good 7200RPM drive (e.g. "wow, I don't remember Windows starting up that fast before!").

tiller is correct. You need to buy the right 7200RPM drive, the Hitachi and Western Digital 7200RPM drives are the best on the market in terms of performance. I like the WD Scorpio Black 750GB (WD7500BPKT).

You can also consider the Seagate Momentus XT, which is a hybrid hard drive and delivers SSD-like performance for everyday tasks.

 

I just took my friend's laptop from an old WD 160GB 5400RPM to my old Seagate 7200.4 500GB 7200RPM HDD.

It's very noticeable, the speed improvement. Everything is much snappier.

 

Here's the bench for the Seagate drive in my G73JH if you compare with the benchmark for the Hitachi drive, you'll see the Hitachi is the way to go. Note that i benchmarked on my 2nd drive, not on the OS drive. In any case, i would move to 7200RPM if you can.

 

Are there any specs on the seagate access times? I have the 9500420ASG and the max data rates are pretty much spot on with that but I can't remember what the latencies were.

The main reason why the 750GB drives are faster is just the higher data density. When you read large files a drive is just sending out data as fast as it can get it off the disk which is determined by the data density and rotational speed.

I'm just wondering because my seagate is starting to feel a little cramped at 500GB what with my games and DVD rips and it's also starting to chatter away more than it used to (though this could just be superfetch and the fact that the data is more spread around meaning more aggressive movements are required by the read head).