Harddrive question: 5400rpm or 7200 rpm?

[ddeder]

How much of a difference does it actually make? Is a 7200 rpm bottlenecked by a slower CPU (700 MHz) or less memory (64MB)? What types of applications will be affected the most? I suppose games, but what about typical office software? Any HD experts out there?

 

[RBBAlfredo]

A 7200 will not be bottlenecked by anything on the system, if you check your bus speeds vs rated HDD transfer speeds (i.e ATA 100) it shows that the hard drive is significantly slower. So, A 7200 is the way to go, and think of this, will your car go faster at 5400rpm, or at 7200 rpm.....
<edit>
Games arent that affected by HDD speeds, the Vid card usually acts as the bottleneck there, however any Video Editing, Databaseing and office applications are the ones most affected by HDD speeds...
No real idea of how much the difference is, as far as I know there are no 7200vs5400 reveiws, that I have found neways

 

[DeadComp]

Extending a bit off the previous post, I'll fill out the data a bit more:

7200 RPM Drive, sustained transfers - 40 MB/Sec Maximum
5400 RPM Drive, sustained transfers - 30 MB/Sec Maximum

(I know its not this simple but its fairly symbolic)

PC133 SDRAM, sustained, KT133A - 600 MB/Sec, Maximum
PC2100 SDRAM, sustained, AMD760 - 800 MB/Sec, Maximum
- Gotta be fair, so here's a P3 and a P4 score
PC133 SDRAM, sustained, i815E - 500 MB/Sec, Maximum
PC800 RDRAM, sustained, i850 - 1400 MB/Sec, Maximum

Approximate data throughput, Athlon / P3 700 MHz CPU - 20 GB/Sec? (I dunno, really, just guessing)

suddenly that shiny new IBM Deskstar or Maxtor looks as slow as a floppy drive (which, BTW, is around 50 KB/sec, Hahahaha)

Ok, that said, I would highly recommend the 7200 RPM drive. The hard drive is usually what makes you wait more then anything else in normal operation and the price delta is pretty small now.

 

[MCS]

The 7200rpm drive will have a lower access time too.

 

[Diffusion]

The hard drive will be the bottle neck in all but the most bizarre cases (4 15,000 rpm drives in RAID 0... in a 486). Go for the fastest drive you can if you do disk heavy work, 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives crawl in many situations, but if your on a budget, 7200rpm is the best you can do.

 

[aircooled]

If you run your OS from a 7200 rpm drive it should feel a little more &quot;snappier&quot; also. But to be honest, My wife's machine has a 7gig 4500rpm (not 5400 but 4500), and it still feels good with win2k and 256mb RAM.

As RBB said, You will get better video capture and editing with one. And for the minimal price difference these days, I wouldn't buy anything slower unless you find a screaming deal on a 5400 that will be used strictley for storage and backup. MP3's play perfectley fine from 5400rpm.

 

[Gand1]

Even better yet.....

The larger the drive you get, the slower it can be. Because of the higher density on the platter the drive does not have to spin as fast to retrieve the same amount of info as from a smaller drive! 🙂