5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM Examined

I would be more confident in the results if the exact same system (9200 or D800) was used for both drives. Your results are interesting, for 'similar' systems, but I would not make any conclusions or purchasing decisions based on the data presented.

You all are forgetting about reliability. The faster the platter turns, the more likely it will suffer from vibrations and shocks. Remember that the platter carries energy lineraly by the mass, but exponentially by the speed.

Graphically:

4200^2 = 17 640 000
5400^2 = 29 160 000
7200^2 = 51 840 000

The numbers have no real meaning, but shows you that the 7200 rpm drive carries three times more energy compared to a 4200 rpm drive. And that energy must go somewhere in an accident, generally your data.

That's why I use a 4200 rpm drive.

Well who is going to drop their lappy while it is running? I can understand them being dropped while their off (I guess...)

Good excuse for a cheap HDD. I'll use it when i try and sell my old 4200HDD

Cool:

E7k60 40gb in a base model 700m 1.6 ghz, 512mb ram:

SiSoftware Sandra

Benchmark Results
Drive Index : 33 MB/s

Benchmark Breakdown
Buffered Read : 90 MB/s
Sequential Read : 37 MB/s
Random Read : 28 MB/s
Buffered Write : 75 MB/s
Sequential Write : 35 MB/s
Random Write : 25 MB/s
Average Access Time : 9 ms (estimated)

I wonder why a smaller, supposedly less dense drive would bench higher?

Well, the 7200 still had significantly faster write speed right? I tested my 60 gig 7200 rpm drive vs a 40 gig rpm drive in the same system and it was almost twice as fast. Does having a larger drive with higher data density really have a such a speed improvement. I'd decided not to get a 100 gig 5400 rpm drive to replace my 60 gig 7200 because I didn't want to give up any performance, even though I need the space.

Interesting....

Sidartha Gautama once said that the desire is the origin of the unhappiness.

You are headed my the masses and have lost your own identity. You now seem to belive that, if everyone else have it, you should have it too. But you don't really know why. That kind of thinking takes you into the absurd.

A laptop is a tool and nothing more. I doubt that you, besides the spirit of competence with others, have a real need to increase the data flow of your hard drive. You just want to have "the lastest", because you think that the people who doesn't is worth less, as you show with your commets. Maybe the one who feels less are yourself and you try to compete with others to proove yourself that's not true.

I use my primary OS (XP Pro) on a 7K60, and play around with Win 2003 Server on a 5400RPM Seagate 100GB drive...the Seagate seems faster than the 7200RPm HGST unit, but that is likely the low overhead of Win 2003 Server.

I have a 7k60 and a 5k80 that i use in my D800 - with exactly the same image on both, and running pcmark2002 (only thing i had at the moment) i would get a hard drive score of about 8000-9000 with the 7k60 and around 5000-6000 on the 5k80. however, in real life usage, i dont notice a difference at all in the speeds, but the extra 20gb sure as hell is noticable my recommendation - get the bigger drive =0) since they are both dirt slow compared to my raptors at home and my atlas' at work

Can anyone corroborate this with factual data/article? Personallly, I have a 5400 rpm hard drive and it operates excellent during a drive on pothole-infested manhattan streets.

By your logic, we should all be using 300 rpm floppies.

The higher RPM will do three things:

1) transfer data more quickly to the heads
2) the higher centrifugal force will keep the platters more free of dust
3) the gyroscopic force will keep the entire system more stable in an environment subject to external forces

For you guys who worry endlessly about head crashes, there are solid state drives available for $10K or so. For myself, I'll take the performance increase of the 7200 RPM for an extra $50 and cross my fingers

Man...

Solid state drives? They may work as a bootable device for recovery and such, but as a hard drive they are definetly a NO-NO. A regular hard drive must withstand millions of write/read operations in it's useful life (swap file is a good example), while a flash device usually starts to fail (produce corruption and such) at about 5,000-10,000 cycles.

I do belive that most of you guys are highly qualified as computer geeks, but a hard drive is a machanical device, subject to physics laws and has certain limits that cannot be overcomed without making some sacrificies.

How all of that extra spinning speed can affect the drive's reliability? Let me explain it to you:

First. Reading from the drive is not a big issue, but writting to it is annother matter. All hard drives are composed by platters generally made from aluminium wich have a magnetic coating. Among all of the physic characteristics of that coating, there is one highly important: the coercitive force.

Coercitive force determines how easy (or hard) is to make a magnetic material to switch from one pole to the other. The faster you need to switch from one pole to the other, the less coercitive force the material must have. But that also means that the drive is more sensible to external influences (demagnetization).

That also mean that the head must be closer to the disk or the magnetic field may influence the surrounding sectors.

Second. Hard drives use lubricated bearings and that means that, when turning the drive a little, it looses more energy because of the increased friction. As the mechanism needs to be more precise in timming, that means that the head has much less chances to write into the correct sector when the platter looses a little speed due to a vibration.

That's why there are technologies like "HDD protector". They turn the drive off when a significan disturbance is detected.

Third. Even the most expensive hard drive touches the surface when striked. If the drive does it, there is more energy to spend on the platter surface. That's because the head touches the surface for the same time, but the speed is higher and friction is in direct relation to it.

I am not saying that using the faster drives is not reliable, but the data stored on them is worth far more than a few extra MB/s.

Sisoft Sandra used to report 22 MB/s in my old Seagate 80 GB 7200 rpm desktop hard drive and this one reports 25 MB/s, so it's definetly not slow at all.

Remember, if you are not happy with what you have, you will never be happy at all.

Greetings.

Here's are some benchmarks which support that fact that the Hitachi 7k60 is the currently the fastest notebook drive available.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/...ook_hd-14.html

Tom's Hardware isn't exact the epitome of scholarly research, but I do see his conclusion as fact; I've got the 7K60 and it's penis-stimulatingly fast.