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    7200rpm vs 5400rpm

    Discussion in 'HP' started by jmxp, Jan 18, 2008.

  1. jmxp

    jmxp Notebook Enthusiast

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    I've seen a few threads discussing 5400 vs 7200rpm drives, so I thought I'd present a comparison of similar drives tested on the same laptop.

    My current laptop is an HP dv9500zCTO, AMD TL-60 (2.0g Turion x2), Vista Home Premium 32bit, 4gigs of RAM. HP provided a 120g 7200rpm Seagate st9120823as. The 2nd drive is a 160g 5400rpm WD 1600BEVS-60RSTO. Both drives are configured as SATA150 and they both have an 8mb cache.

    Results are from SiSoftware Sandra Lite v2008.1.13.12

    The scale is off some because Sisoft compared the 7200rpm drive to much faster setups (raid 0) than the 5400rpm drive. So while the 7200 bar appears slower compared to the 5400 bar, it's not. These are read tests only. This software wants an empty disk before performing write tests for some reason.

    7200 RPM Drive
    [​IMG]

    5400 RPM Drive
    [​IMG]
     
    jmxp, Jan 18, 2008
    #1
  2. jmxp

    jmxp Notebook Enthusiast

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    PS I think the 7200rpm performance really kinda sucks. May have to track down a Barracuda which SiSoft shows as a reference drive @ 60mb/s.
     
    jmxp, Jan 18, 2008
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  3. brianstretch

    brianstretch Notebook Virtuoso

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    7200RPM drives are great for faster access times but provide a much less impressive jump in streaming throughput due to their lower platter density. I picked up a Hitachi 120GB 7200RPM drive last time just because the price diff wasn't that much and I didn't need anything bigger. Boot times ought to be significantly faster. When I've bought retail notebooks that came with 5400RPM drives I've left them alone.

    4200RPM drives, OTOH, should be avoided. Bleah.
     
    brianstretch, Jan 18, 2008
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