7200 rpm vs. 5400 rpm

For those of you that have a 7200 rpm drive, does it make much of a difference in a laptop over a 5400 rpm? Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but I couldn't find a thread.

It seems that with a fast processor and ample memory that the hard drive speed could be a bottleneck...

TIA

 

While I do notice a difference, generally with things like... loading RAW images, editing large video, its pretty minimal overall. Its more like a few seconds here and there. Now its a giant difference over the 4200 RPM that came with my S360.

Heat, noise, battery life, about the same though the Hitachi unit I have is definatly a bit louder than my Seagate or even the 5400 RPM hitachi.

 

As noted, the faster drive will shine when doing hard drive intensive things. The Hitachis do run a bit warmer.

 

An earlier reply mentioned video editing and that the difference wouldn't be that great. I tend to agree with that statement, BUT I believe the difference will not be in the video "editing", but the video "capturing". If you are capturing digital video, the hard drive has to work very hard to keep up with the data stream. The video you are capturing is playing in real time and it does not wait for the hard drive to catch up. The result could be dropped frames in the video capture. If you plan on doing video capture and cannot live with dropped frames, I would definitely recommend the 7200 rpm drive.

 

admittadly I'm not a hardcore editor but just doing basic things in Premiere like cutting pasting hell opening does show a difference in load time etc.

 

If you have extra $$$ to spent, go for the 7200 rpm.

 

"If you have extra $$$ to spent, go for the 7200 rpm."

I got me a new 7K60 for 99 bucks +sh on the net, so there is not much of a difference these days. It is scratchy when working thou, can't hear it otherwise. I have pre 5K100 one 5400 40 gig Hitachi and it is dead silent.The other 60 gig 5K100 is scratchy too. So, I guess, newer technologies are louder, yet faster.

 

yes, I do believe that a faster hard drive increses permonace considerably improves performance, as the RAM can access files from the HDD quickly. The downside is that they can be noisy, can generate heat and the biggest downside is that they can take up a lot of battery life.

 

Depending on the position of the disk drive in the machine, you could definetly notice a difference in heat. 7200rpm drive without a doubt, run much hotter. It can get get very uncomfortable. While the difference in performance is there, In my experience its negligable. I would throw more money into a bigger drive.

 

""I would throw more money into a bigger drive.""

As it was many times stated

4200 to 5400 -> ~35-40% gain
4200 to 7200 -> ~45-50% gain
5400 to 7200 -> ~10-15% gain

It is up to every body how to spend their money.

 

Go for anything except a 4200. Even though I say this when using a 4200 it runs everything from games to office documents. I guess you would benefit from a 5400 rpm hard drive.

 

4200 is just too slow in my opinion.

Thing is, if money is of concern then fine, it won't kill anyone to use a 4200rpm harddrive, and go for bigger storage.

Thing is I just remember my old Fujitsu 4200 desktop harddrives that were like 4-10gbs each, so yeah, extremely slow.

Cheers,
Mike

 

i have a 5400 ATA drive right now. Would I be able to put in a SATA drive?

 

That's assuming you're going from the same size drive to another drive of the same size.

a 100gb 5400rpm drive will give you slightly quicker performance than say, a 40 or 60gb 7200rpm drive.

Remember - if you fill more than half your drive up, you'll see the drive begin to slow down (slightly at half, but much more when you approach 100% full)

 

hurricane you are misinformed.

A 100gb 5400rpm drive will not be quicker than a 40gb or 60gb 7200rpm drive.

I know what you're getting at though. The whole platter density and all that. I'm not too familliar with it, BUT I will say this, it all depends on the model and make.

You cannot fill a drive up to 100% so I don't know what you're getting at there.

All in all you are right about the drive slowing down after filling it up. All drives will begin to slow down once you start filling it with stuff, this is unavoidable.

In general, a 7200rpm drive will be faster than a 5400rpm drive, period. Yes you can get into access times, spin rate, blah blah blah, but 7200rpm is still faster than 5400rpm.

Even those crazy Western Digital Raptors spinning at 10 000rpm, yes TEN THOUSAND rpm, are slower than harddrives spinning at 7200rpm in some tests, which ones I forget, I believe it was some kind of access time or something.

Anyhoo' just don't go lower than a 5400rpm drive.

Cheers,
Mike

 

I found this guide to be very informative:
2.5-inch Hard Disk Drive RPM Guide

 

bump to my question

 

No. And there's no reason why you should want to.

 

why not?????

 

Why yes???

 

could you elaborate please

 

Could you?

 

PATA and SATA are not compatible. Different plugs

 

I've tested myself.

You actually just supported my point - Raptors being slower than some of the larger 7200rpm drives. - Spindle speed is not the ultimate factor in speed.

Nowadays, it's very easy to eat up 20GB's just for program files. Tack on about 10GB for personal files, pictures, swap drives, and you're looking at 30GB for the basic user. A 40GB - although not slow, would already be running below maximum efficiency.

 

Like qwester said - the plugs are different, it's a different interface. I wouldn't worry about it on a laptop. The only advantage at this point is convienience if you wanted to plug the drive into a desktop computer (you shouldn't need any adaptors). Not a huge advantage IMO as you can pickup external USB HD enclosures now for about $10 CDN.

 

Hurricane, not SLOWER than some 7200rpms just slower in some tests, overall the raptors are faster.

Go read some reviews.

 

I don't know what laptop you have, but the answer is "maybe". Depends on if your laptop has an SATA port.

And there is a slight benefit. While laptop hard drives aren't gonna show any noticeable speed improvement by running on an SATA bus over a PATA bus...there are circumstances where you can get an increase.

My laptop has an Intel 915 chipset...so only one IDE/PATA port. That means my DVD drive and my hard drive are on the same chain. My motherboard also supports SATA(it was an option on the custom built versions of my system). So theoretically, I can replace my PATA hard drive with an SATA hard drive. I'd get a performance bump, only because my drives wouldn't be running over the same IDE channel. If I had another laptop that had two separate IDE channels in the first place...and the drives were individually hooked up to them, then going SATA might net me a 3-4% increase...and the ability to run some benchmark numbers that'd never pan out in real world use.

So find out if your laptop has an SATA port on it. But it'd only be worth doing if you either have both devices on the same IDE channel(like me) or if you're planning on replacing the drive anyways(bigger/faster) and would like to utilize the SATA port "just because".

 

OK is it really worth upgrading to a 7200 rpm hard drive I've been trying to read some other topics and they just expanded so big that I decided to make my own [sorry].
I'm talking for a Sony SZ laptop...upgrading it through www.portableone.com
80gig 7200rpm from a 100gig 5400rpm

-Now this makes it unclear to me what type of (band) hard drive they use.

7200rpm
Pros
faster transfer I believe what someone told me was u'll notice only a .05 second difference for transfering. Which IMO will not be noticable at all!
Cons
Decreases battery life
¿Can over heat
I will put some games [wc3/starcraft] but that really has nothing to do with hard drive speed but more with gfx.

Unfortunatly thats all i've personally compiled and am unsure if I should really spend the money to upgrade to get a decrease in battery life.

Thank you for your help and time to answer this silly post!

 

theres alot more to drives than just size and rpm speed. interface, pata or sata? cache? access time? yes rpm does have a decent factor is determining transfer speed. sata interface is faster than pata, even though most sata drives are 7200 rpm. cache on the drive allows for more precache which help acheive faster transfer rates. a 7200 rpm pata drive with little cache and terrible access time wont be faster than a pata 5400 rpm drive with huge cache and fast access times. GL

 

Density is also a factor that most people overlook. On average, a 100GB 5400RPM drive will outperform a 60GB 7200RPM drive due to data density.

In most cases, a 7200RPM drive only truly shines when doing video editing or anything that requires heavy hard drive access. I find spending excessive amounts of money on a HDD for gaming purposes is useless, as chances are, you're probably going to get 1-2GB of RAM anyway, in which that case, the advantages of increased HDD performance don't matter so much anymore.

 

+1 for the above comments. The only performance benefits you're going to see are slightly reduced boot/load times, unless you're doing something very disk intensive (ie: audio/video editing).

You may want to look into something like the new Seagate Momentus 5400.3 drives. It has the noise/heat/power consumption profiles of a 5400rpm drive, with data densities high enough to give it near 7200rpm performance.

 

So what should I go for - 120gig 5400rpm or 80gig 7200rpm?
80 is about $100 more

 

Can anyone reply please?
*BUMP*

 

How about for gaming? Does 7200 over 5400 make a huge difference? I'm getting an S96J, and I could save $80 to move from a 100 gb 7200 to a 100 gb 5400... but is that really worth the $80 in terms of gaming performance?

 

I don't claim to be an expert in this field, but I am one picky enough to have 10krpm raptors raided in my desktop.

While most things you do you aren't going to see anything you can notice (though it will be there), things like installing games, running large video files, transfering too or from my network. I can tell the difference.