7200 v 5400 overrated, check the specs

[Rigoletto]

I have been searching through the forum and seen that 7200 drives are seriously overestimated because users upgrade from an OLD 5400 drive, and lo and behold, their new drive is so much faster and it's because the spindle speed is different, right?- mainly WRONG. Look at track densities.
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/prod/deskstar.htm
Further, it's probably the drive cache making a proportion of difference in speed.
I must say though, I'd go with IBM every time for HD. Quiet, fast, reliable. Mind you I would prefer a 5400 for expense and heat reasons.

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Spindle speed does make a difference, especially in seek/access times. It may not make a HUGE difference, but every little bit counts. Also, my 7200 RPM IBM 18ES runs cool to the touch.

 

[Sohcan]

Exactly...throughput is dependant on both spindle speed and arial density. A high-density 5400rpm HD could have a higher throughput than a lower-density 7200rpm HD (though the 7200rpm HD will usually have lower access and seek times). When manufacturers move to higher density platters, they often release them on 5400rpm HDs first (I guess due to heat reasons), then move to 7200rpms.

 

[Moonbender]

Yeah, 5400 are usually quite cool (in the sense of cold ), also they're usually not as loud as 7200 rpm drives. They're cheaper, too.
I think for normal (ie consumer not server) HDs there has to be an end to rising rpm numbers. Ever heard one of those 10k rpm SCSI drives? I haven't but I was told they're *horribly* loud and I have no reason to think otherwise.
What's the point in getting expensive speakers when you've always got your HDs, CDROM or DVD (I *hate* my 40x drive, I'd much rather have my old 8x working again) and whatever fans you cramped into the case to cool it down, sounding like turbines?

 

[pm]

The early 10krpm are horribly loud and very hot (they require a fan blowing over them). I have two and I can personally attest to this (as I already wrote in the "What's the biggest hardware mistake that you've ever made?" thread). The newer ones are so quiet that they might as well be 5.4krpm (I have a Quantum Atlas II U160 SCSI drive in this C3600 and I rarely can hear it).

I've read that IBM needed to knock the density down because they had problems reading from the higher density tracks at 7.2krpm due to head jitter. And there's no denying that the average seek rate is higher on the 7.2krpm drives.

 

[DaddyG]

When all else is equal the ONLY difference between 5400 and 7200 rpm is latency. Average Drive latency is 1/2 the rotational delay. When the heads reach the track after the seek, on average the actual data required is 1/2 a rev away. Do the math, the difference is about 1.2 millisecs. Areal density, cache size, # of platters all effect the actual drive performance.

 

[jor888]

WHy must ppl bring this crap up again when it has already been proven that the 7200 rpm is faster than 5400 rpm. God why ppl still want to argue about the earth is flat?

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Access time/latency is arguably one of the biggest slowdowns. Who cares if your drive can send files at 6666MB/sec if it takes the drive 30 seconds to find it? (obviously these numbers are huge exaggerations)

Also, my Atlas 10K is quiet.

 

[fkloster]

Couple of peeps around these 'parts sportin' X15's say they are quite and only luke warm to the touch! (not to mention that 3.9ms access time )

 

[Rigoletto]

jor888, I don't think you can have too many brain cells because you clearly haven't even retained my original post. We know that 7200 is potentially faster than 5400, but it isn't the dominant factor that people tend to think. If you would actually look at the specs, you would know.

 

[Noriaki]

The only major issue with 7200v5400 is rotational latency..like DaddyG said

Besides..things like the 37MB/s transfer rate on a 75gxp are theroretical and will never use them, depends what the drive is used for.
For my mp3/storage drives I woudln't use a 7200rpm drive..waste of money (A 40Gig IBM 40GV would be a nice choice here, 2 platters, 20gig each 5400rpm, low platter count, low speed and low heat/noise)
But for drives that run Virtual memory? Well they are looking for maybe 64k at a time...but when you want it you want it *FAST*
I go for 7200rpm to shave that little bit off of seek time..but it's certainly pointless to pick up a 7200rpm drive because of the higher transfer rate.

You have some good points Rigoletto, and I personally have both 5400rpm and 7200rpm in my system and think it will stay that way for a while. Depends on what you want from a particular drive.

It's not like 7200rpm makes a drive good and 5400rpm makes it bad, you're right in that it's not the dominating statistic, but depending on what the drive is for it may be an important one.

Well 7200v5400 is a better measure of performance than ATA100v66

 

[Rigoletto]

What I saw was that the is a need for a little more cache on the faster spinning drives. But this is not in the order of 4x from 512Kb to 2Mb. They add so much more cache to the 7200s because they know people buy the 7200 as a semi-premium product. Like, would you sell a new Rolls-Royce without nice heating for your tootsies and butt?

 

[xtreme2k]

going for 7200 does increase the transfer rate generally
but whats more important is the rotational lantency
most programs do NOT access the hdd in a linearly therefore the pure maximum transfer rate is never reached anyway
however, what most programs does it it requires access from many files this is where the reduced rotational lantency really helps

 

[LXi]

Cache difference? I dont know what you're talking about. Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus and DiamondMax utilize 7200rpm and 5400rpm respectively, and they both have the same amount of cache(2MB), and the 7200rpm DM Plus still outperformed the 5400rpm DiamondMax by a wide margin.