Question: 5400rpm and 7200rpm HDDs?

I remember reading a while back that a higher capacity 5400rpm HDD will yield the same performance (booting, retrieving documents, opening applications, etc.) as a 7200rpm HDD, specifically doing so while producing less heat and consuming less battery. For example, a 320GB 5400rpm drive should yield about the same performance as say a 200GB 7200rpm drive. Is there any truth to this? Would I be better off just getting a higher capacity 5400rpm drive?

I know that the 7200rpm drives have become pretty big now, but I'm worried about how much heat they produce and, more importantly, how they affect battery life. Are the newer 7200rpm drives more efficient in this regard, or should I still be considering a 5400rpm drive? How much difference is there between the two in terms of heat and battery life?

 

It doen't make much sense to make generalizations. As an example: The Hitachi 7K200 200GB will outperform any 320GB/5400rpm on the market. But the Seagate 7200.2 200GB does not.

Here are some real life battery life differences between 5400rpm and 7200 rpm:
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/intel-x25-m.aspx?page=7

If you're after:
- speed: WD3200BEKT is the nr.1 to get (Scorpio Black).
- speed & max battery life: Seagate 7200.3 320GB
- capacity and battery life: WD5000BEVT.

In a week or two the Seagate 7200.4 may have arrived. It will probably outperform the current WD.

 

Thanks, PhilFlow. Does that mean the notion that a higher capacity 5400rpm drive outperforming a lower capacity 7200rpm drive is totally false, or is it false in some cases but true in others (perhaps when comparing different brands, etc.)?

 

Not entirely.

The 5400rpm WD5000BEVT outperforms the Hitachi 7200rpm 200GB.

Why? Because the WD has 250GB per platter and the Hitachi has 100GB per platter the WD delivers higher throughput than the Hitachi.

So it's important how much data per platter a drive has, how many platters, the rotational speed, I/Os per second, the seek time. Among other things.

 

Ah, I see. So it depends on the capacity of the individual platters?

 

Its more like a coincidence that the 100GB/platter 7200RPM drives, and the 160GB/platter 5400RPM drives performed closely. The former would have been better in the sense, that they had lower access times, so loading times would have been slightly shorter, and they are usually cheaper than the newer HDDs.

There's a lot more that goes into performance comparison and all, but yeah the main general thing is size of each platter.

Each drive usually has the components manufactured in the same way, i.e. platters, heads, shell/casing, actuator shaft, etc. but the programming of the ATA controller is different for each drive, which brings about the slight difference in performance of similarly spec'ed HDDs. (i.e. 7200.2 v/s 7K200, 7200.3 v/s 7K320)

 

Yes that's important.

And the rotational speed, I/Os per second, the seek time, the brand, the firmware are also important.

For example a WD 320GB/5400rpm can perform completely different than a Seagate 320GB/5400rpm.

If you have the time I suggest you read the Laptopmag review I linked to above or this one:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079/1

 

I understand exactly what you're saying. Thanks.

Yeah, I'm beginning to get a grasp of it pretty quickly. I will go ahead and read the link you posted now. I'm done with finals so I have plenty of time on my hands.

 

I decided a while back that I was going to wait a while longer before looking into SSD's. I really like what they are said to offer, but the price per GB just doesn't justify getting one right now for me. I'm okay with the mechanical drives still. I was perusing Newegg and found one that I'm very interested in. I was wondering what you guys (Phil and Andy) think about it:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136280

 

I think that is the best drive you can get at the moment.

If you'd want the one with Freefall sensor you need the WD3200BJKT.

 

Its fine. All 3 drives - 7200.3, WD Black, 7K320, are gonna perform similarly without any noticeable difference in real-world performance.

You could check out this 7K320 at ZZF.

 

Is this similar to the shock-mounted technology that Lenovo offers with their factory harddrive?

I'll definitely check it out. You wouldn't happen to know how quiet this drive is compared to the WD, would you?

 

I had both at one time, and ironically the WD was a bit quieter and cooler (by 5*C) than the 7K320.

Though, K-Tron has two of the 160GB versions of the 7K320, and I think he said that the drives were pretty quiet.

Quality usually varies from one drive to another, but TBH, I've heard more complaints regarding the WD, which also had some clicking issues (which was fixed in a patch released by WDC I think).

Yep. FFS or G-Shock is quite a useful feature, but it has its up+down-sides. The 7K320 has a thicker shell according to the datasheet and a much higher shock resistance, which probably compensates for the absence of the FFS feature in it.

 

I don't know what Lenovo provides.

A freefall sensor senses sudden movements like falling and parks the heads really quickly to prevent the head from damaging the platter. It's no guarantee though you can still have damage.

 

Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly is FFS? I'm sure I can surmise, but I'd rather have the concrete information. Also, what are the drawbacks?

That's exactly what Lenovo's factory hard drives are supposed to do, so I guess they're the same thing.

 

Andy, what do you think about going from a Seagate 200GB 7200RPM HDD to a WD3200BEKT? I remember asking about this a while back and I believe the answer I got was that the difference would be negligible and it's a pointless upgrade unless I need the space. I really don't care for the space but I'm curious about performance.

 

It will be faster. You'll notice shorter loading times.

When I upgraded from the WD3200BEVT to the WD3200BEKT, I did notice a boost in performance, and you can kinda boost it even more by installing the OS on a smaller partition at the outer edge of the platter.

The boost does kinda feel small at first, but when you run intensive tasks, like photoshop and video encoding the difference is definitely noticeable, and even the background apps feel more responsive.

@THAANSA3: The same thing, parking the heads in the landing zone, when the drive notices a sudden change in acceleration.

Theoretically, it should work when you like drop your notebook down, or kinda throw it on the couch or something, but if you bump the HDD side of the notebook into the wall (suddenly!), it won't really work. There needs to be kinda of a time-lag, in the sense that the HDD will have to go through a certain distance (~10cm) and actually feel that change in acceleration.

So, if the collision is almost instantaneous and occurs in a short amount of distance, the heads will crash into the platter, before the accelerometer is able to detect the acceleration change and the controller is able to park the heads.

 

Yeah, that's what I thought. Thanks again. I really want to thank you and PhilFlow for all of the help/information that you two have shared with me thus far. I really do appreciate it guys.

 

How do I do install it on a smaller partition at the outer edge of the platter? And would you recommend the WD over the Seagate 7200.3?

The few Hdtune benchmarks I've seen show about a 10-15MB increase in transfer rate and a slightly slower access time. I attached a screen shot of my HDtune bench for you to take a look....if it's worth the upgrade then I'm definitely doing it so let me know

 

It will be kinda negligible for you. App loading time kinda depends more upon the average access time of the drive. You won't really notice a huge boost in performance (to be honest). Better to wait for a couple of months for the 250GB/platter 7200RPM HDDs to be available at good prices.

(I moved from a 5400RPM to a 7200RPM, so the boost was noticeable to me)

 

That's good to know, thanks!

 

How long we talking?

 

Supposedly Jan 09 will see some of these on sale in retail channels.

 

Interesting. I can wait a few more weeks before putting in an order if that's the case.

 

If you just bought the drive and are on your way installing windows and creating partitions for example. Then just create a small partition that is let's say max 50GB, if you look at the HD Tune benchmarks you'll see that the transferspeeds are very good from 0-20% in the diagram, and there's the performance on how fast your partition is gonna be. So you can count it out yourself on how the performance will be depending on how big you make the first primary partition, as that partition will be created at the fastest part of the platter.

 

Gotcha, thanks for that.

 

In that case wait.

The 250GB single platter 7200rp, drives promise to be one hot hard drive. Figurally speaking

It would also be good to see who makes the fastest one, WD, Hitachi or Seagate.

 

Hasn't Hitachi been holding the throne for quite some time now?

 

Hitachi was the fastest with the previous generation (100 GB per platter).

The current generation (160GB per platter) is lead by WD. Although Seagate does better in synthetic benchmarks.

 

Wow, I had no idea. I thought Hitachi was still the leader.

 

Hitachi is still the leader for reliabilty
I think they are focusing more now on producing quiet drives, because thats really where the market is going. The 7K320's I have are amazingly quiet.

Usually hitachi tunes their drives to perform the best in appication loading. It can be seen in the realtime benhcies like pcmark

K-TRON

 

Ah, I see. I'm leading toward Hitachi. I have a question, however. What about Samsung drives? I've heard good things sporadically. Are they as reliable/good as the more notable names (Hitachi, WD, Seagate)?

 

thaansa3, its really hard to answer these kind of questions because some harddrive models are good and others are bad. I am sure that alot of people will say that they had problems with samsung drives and others will say they never had problems.
In my experience i only had one laptop drive made by samsung. My samsung drive is running good for the past 8 months or so and i never had a single problem with it. I cant generalize about their entire line of drives, but usually they are pretty good/on par with the other manufacturers.

K-TRON

 

I hear you, K-TRON. I know that it's difficult to comment about an entire line, but I guess I just didn't phrase my question correctly. I was just looking for a broad consensus reputation-wise. Kind of like how Honda and Toyota have a reputation of being super reliable, while Daewoo doesn't. That sorta thing.

*Sorry if the analogy was ridiculous, but it's the best I could come up with at the moment