Question Hdd rpms

[tinpanalley]

Feel like a bit of a moron, sometimes you know about rather complicated computer things, (I just built a system, etc) but then other simpler things you just don't know.
I just found out -- which blew my mind a bit I'm embarrassed to admit -- that there's nothing wrong with using 5400rpm hdds to store and playback music and video even uncompressed wav, or 1080p 5.1 video files as long as it's one stream at a time. Is that entirely true?
So, questions...
1. Games - playable no problem on 5400rpm drives? (Offline only)
2. Editing video and audio and photo edit work? Is that kind of use fine on a 5400rpm drive?

Thanks!

 

[Oyeve]

Nope. 5400, while can do all of the above, will feel slow. Game load times will drag, streaming local video files would be fine, video editing while will still work, will feel slow AF. Hell, I gave up of spin HDS long ago. All SSD. With SSD prices plummeting I see no reason to even get spin drives unless for archiving purposes.

 

[tinpanalley]

With SSD prices plummeting I see no reason to even get spin drives unless for archiving purposes.

They're nowhere near as interesting price wise for the quantity of storage as hdds are. Even at lower prices recently.

 

[killster1]

dont be silly 5400 is fine tho some 5400 class still spin faster. check out the MB/s 200! some cheap ssd go slower then that. biggest issue is the few seconds it takes to start spinning up after its moving it goes plenty fine. one stream at a time? NO WAY! i maybe way wrong but i thought 4k was at most 62MB/s. Im kinda sleepy right now so maybe im super wrong and someone can correct me :0

 

[tinpanalley]

How about copying data to and from a 5400? Any slowdowns there?

 

[killster1]

How about copying data to and from a 5400? Any slowdowns there?

i just showed the chart i actually get around 150MB/s i use A LOT of 8tb red shucked from the externals. i will start using 12tb ones (think i have 2 more empty 8tb drives) i LOVE THEM and love the price, anyone that says SSD most likely doesnt have alot of data or are millionaires.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

So, questions...
1. Games - playable no problem on 5400rpm drives? (Offline only)
2. Editing video and audio and photo edit work? Is that kind of use fine on a 5400rpm drive?

Games are no problem, as long as you have enough RAM. Most are still designed to be loaded from a HDD. There could be issues with next-gen console ports, since consoles too are moving to SSDs.

I'd say video editing depends on what you're editing. A HDD is good enough for 1080p editing, but if you're doing 4K, I'd get an SSD to work on. Then use the HDD for archiving done work.

Photo editing again depends. For large RAW files, and/or massive amounts of shots, you'll see a definite improvement with an SSD. 5400RPM drives aren't really cut out to work on large numbers of files. If we're talking the odd JPEG snapshot here and there, any HDD will do fine.

check out the MB/s 200! some cheap ssd go slower then that.

Sounds impressive. Until you start doing random I/O on it. Then transfer rates drop down into the single digit range. For truly random 4K I/O, any 5400RPM disk will not do more then 1-1.5MB/s.

7200RPM drives are a bit better, some of the really good ones can do 2-2.5MB/s these days, but since it's result of the increased rotation speed, there isn't a whole lot manufacturers can do to improve performance. Other then further increasing rotation speed to 10 or 15.000RPM, which come with their own trade-offs.

Even then HDDs will not match even the slowest SSDs currently on the market.

 

[tinpanalley]

Ok, so really in the end, any hdd will 'DO' anything but not necessarily effectively and the 5400rpm is fine for any purpose argument is fine but with major caveats.

I would never edit higher than 1080p anyway because I believe it to be pointless, I've been an independent filmmaker for 20 years and see no point in 2K and even less point (if less than no point is possible) in 4K unless you're capturing and heavily heavily restoring old footage that needs repair. Or unless you happen to have some kind of deal where you're producing things that will go on movie theatre screens. 4K for the common household user or consumer and even the amateur professional is a tech industry trap that currently serves little purpose. Unless, again, as I said you happen to be a studio action film editor or you do ads for large screen display. And as far as photo editing, for me it's often at least highest res jpg editing. But I like the idea of an SSD for both of those things.

But I would need to be able to quickly transfer 50-100GB of data at a time to or from this drive even though it's mainly for storage and playback. And I'd also need to upload and download from an online server at 1Gigabit speed.

Thanks for the input guys. I guess if it's purely for video and audio I'm fine. But the need to copy to and from quickly could kill that.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I would never edit higher than 1080p anyway because I believe it to be pointless, I've been an independent filmmaker for 20 years and see no point in 2K and even less point (if less than no point is possible) in 4K unless you're capturing and heavily heavily restoring old footage that needs repair. Or unless you happen to have some kind of deal where you're producing things that will go on movie theatre screens. 4K for the common household user or consumer and even the amateur professional is a tech industry trap that currently serves little purpose. Unless, again, as I said you happen to be a studio action film editor or you do ads for large screen display. And as far as photo editing, for me it's often at least highest res jpg editing. But I like the idea of an SSD for both of those things.

I may not be an "independent filmmaker", but I can certainly tell the difference, and appreciate the added resolution, when watching my favorite TechTubers on YT, @4K. I do have a 4K display. 1080P looks, "less good" on it. Still, mostly indistinguishable, except when they're putting charts & graphs on the screen, then the 4K is noticeably sharper.

 

[tinpanalley]

I may not be an "independent filmmaker", but I can certainly tell the difference, and appreciate the added resolution, when watching my favorite TechTubers on YT, @4K. I do have a 4K display. 1080P looks, "less good" on it. Still, mostly indistinguishable, except when they're putting charts & graphs on the screen, then the 4K is noticeably sharper.

Right, it depends on the content you're watching and what you're watching it on. I didn't say there wasn't an actual difference, even purely based on specs there is a difference. I said, "serves little purpose" and that I personally saw no point in it. But when I work, I have purely dramatic and budgetary reasons for choice of format.

 

[aigomorla]

to be fair...

im gonna say when someone buys a 12TB drive they do not typically intend to run it solo.
(well you would have to have been very poorly recommended this route, as backing up a 12TB drive is next to near impossible unless u have another 12TB+ drive to dump on, and if your not a fan of backup.... sigh... OK... i wont continue then.)

Its typically either RAIDED on (z)2 / 5 / 10 . (for parity and fault protection NOT BACKUP)

So under the last 2, typically you get faster performance, unless its just paired.
So even a 5400rpm under RaidZ2 for example, can beat 7200rpm's without breaking a sweat in load environments.

 

[fzabkar]

Some of WD's "5400 RPM class" drives actually spin at 7200 RPM.

A new twist to IntelliPower?
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=38333

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Feel like a bit of a moron, sometimes you know about rather complicated computer things, (I just built a system, etc) but then other simpler things you just don't know.
I just found out -- which blew my mind a bit I'm embarrassed to admit -- that there's nothing wrong with using 5400rpm hdds to store and playback music and video even uncompressed wav, or 1080p 5.1 video files as long as it's one stream at a time. Is that entirely true?

That sort of advice was common - and not wrong - back in the '90s. Stuff today is too fast to matter, which means that yes, practically speaking that's entirely true.

Compare bandwidth - an atypically slow 5400rpm HDD is still capable of ~100MB/sec sequential reads, with writes about half that speed. (Compared to maybe 10-20MB/sec in the '90s.) That's 800Mbps read, 400Mbps write. Even if you cut that number in half again for insurance, a 1080p video stream is ~8Mbps and an uncompressed 24-bit/96khz audio is 2.3Mbps. So it's definitely able to move that amount of data around without a hiccough.

The "one stream at a time" advice is dependent on the drive's ability to switch between different tasks rapidly (which is a thing mechanical HDDs are actually kind of terrible at.) That said, on a system with sufficient RAM for buffering and an HDD that supports command queuing (NCQ has been standard on SATA drives since like 2003.) you should expect to be able to do 2-3 things at once pretty easily.

So, questions...
1. Games - playable no problem on 5400rpm drives? (Offline only)
2. Editing video and audio and photo edit work? Is that kind of use fine on a 5400rpm drive?

Yes and yes.

A 5400rpm drive will read and write, on average, about 75% as fast as a 7200rpm drive that is otherwise identical, but there's so much variation from other factors (like platter density, what region on the platters data is being read/written, cache sizes, fragmentation, etc.) that basically a single 5400rpm drive and a single 7200rpm drive should be considered functionally equivalent - if it works ok on a 7200rpm drive, it should work ok on a 5400rpm drive, for most values of "ok."

For HD video editing, I will mention that while a 5400rpm HDD will do the job, and won't have a negative impact on the final quality of the video, anything slower than a pretty decent SSD (or a nice RAID array) is going to feel pretty chuggy if you're doing anything the least bit complex. But that applies to 7200rpm drives too.

 

[tinpanalley]

That sort of advice was common - and not wrong - back in the '90s. Stuff today is too fast to matter, which means that yes, practically speaking that's entirely true.

Compare bandwidth - an atypically slow 5400rpm HDD is still capable of ~100MB/sec sequential reads, with writes about half that speed. (Compared to maybe 10-20MB/sec in the '90s.) That's 800Mbps read, 400Mbps write. Even if you cut that number in half again for insurance, a 1080p video stream is ~8Mbps and an uncompressed 24-bit/96khz audio is 2.3Mbps. So it's definitely able to move that amount of data around without a hiccough.

The "one stream at a time" advice is dependent on the drive's ability to switch between different tasks rapidly (which is a thing mechanical HDDs are actually kind of terrible at.) That said, on a system with sufficient RAM for buffering and an HDD that supports command queuing (NCQ has been standard on SATA drives since like 2003.) you should expect to be able to do 2-3 things at once pretty easily.



Yes and yes.

A 5400rpm drive will read and write, on average, about 75% as fast as a 7200rpm drive that is otherwise identical, but there's so much variation from other factors (like platter density, what region on the platters data is being read/written, cache sizes, fragmentation, etc.) that basically a single 5400rpm drive and a single 7200rpm drive should be considered functionally equivalent - if it works ok on a 7200rpm drive, it should work ok on a 5400rpm drive, for most values of "ok."

For HD video editing, I will mention that while a 5400rpm HDD will do the job, and won't have a negative impact on the final quality of the video, anything slower than a pretty decent SSD (or a nice RAID array) is going to feel pretty chuggy if you're doing anything the least bit complex. But that applies to 7200rpm drives too.

Thank you!! I really appreciate your thorough response and help.
I really seem to need to understand RAID arrays. I don't know about them at all or why they're used.
Ok, so I should keep an ssd for editing... Done, I have one I'm not using. And playback of video and audio will be fine, and as long as i don't need to worry that when i do my backups every few months, transferring several hundred GB at once won't be significantly slower than on a 720p, then that takes care of all my concerns.

 

[sdifox]

These days hdd should just be WORM duty for content like music and video and for backup. Everything else on nvme.

 

[tinpanalley]

These days hdd should just be WORM duty for content like music and video and for backup. Everything else on nvme.

Ok, but how about copying large chunks back and forth while backing up, will 5400rpm be a pain?

 

[sdifox]

Ok, but how about copying large chunks back and forth while backing up, will 5400rpm be a pain?

Define large.

 

[Charlie98]

How about copying data to and from a 5400? Any slowdowns there?

I was juggling drives around last year... I put a new 6TB drive in the HTPC, so I moved the former HDD... a 3TB WD Red... to the desktop for storage purposes. I can tell it's not a 7200RPM drive. I swap files around quite a bit... video files, large picture files (100GB) and such... and I was scratching my head one day why it was taking so long, even with a larger (and less full, percentage-wise) drive. Then it hit me. Reds are 5900 (?) RPM drives... I swapped that crap out next day for a 7200....

In the HTPC, a slower drive isn't a problem streaming or whatever, but just moving files around on the other PC I could tell.

 

[Mantrid-Drone]

Even 7200RPM is slow if you also have a SSD for comparison.

On one PC I have a 1TB 7200RPM HDD principally for storage but as the SSD is relatively small I decided to put all portable programs on that. I noticed the difference immediately.

There's a toolbox of multiple small, useful programs called WSCC which is really just a shell for the MS Syinternals Suite and other things like NirSoft Utilities. When you check for updates there's almost 400 programs to load - on the SDD that takes under 10 secs, when moved to the HDD: almost 60 secs to do the same thing. It is so painfully slow the system often reports the program is not responding.

I dread to think what using a 5400RPM would be like and I do not intend to find out.

However I'm still very much a HDD enthusiast for storage, backups and only occasionally used programs or accessed archives. I have a 160GB 7200RPM set up for that and I happily use some old IDE 120GB and 160GB in USB housing for backup too and I think one of those is 5400RPM.

They're still very useful of whatever type and you're not going to get a 500GB used SSD (at least not one you'd trust) for £10 which is what I payed for a good quality, tested SATA Seagate HDD only a couple of months ago. Cheap storage and backup - a HDD is still the way to go.

 

[tinpanalley]

Define large.

Could be... transferring 50-75GB at a time. Video files. Maybe some audio.
What kind of time is that gonna be, roughly?

 

[sdifox]

Could be... transferring 50-75GB at a time. Video files. Maybe some audio.
What kind of time is that gonna be, roughly?

Sequential write would not be too bad. Say you sustain 150MBps, that gives you about 9GB per minute. So under 9 min for 75GB. Remember you don't have to baby sit it.

 

[tinpanalley]

Sequential write would not be too bad. Say you sustain 150MBps, that gives you about 9GB per minute. So under 9 min for 75GB. Remember you don't have to baby sit it.

Well, I'd very likely be copying by either directly connecting internally or it would live there. I have a dock that I use for convenience which is USB3.0, I imagine that would be slower. Sequential write not too bad meaning random writes would be bad?

 

[sdifox]

Well, I'd very likely be copying by either directly connecting internally or it would live there. I have a dock that I use for convenience which is USB3.0, I imagine that would be slower. Sequential write not too bad meaning random writes would be bad?

Single HDD cannot saturate USB3.0, you are fine.
Random writes would obviously be slower since you have to lift head and seek to new position.

 

[tinpanalley]

Single HDD cannot saturate USB3.0, you are fine.
Random writes would obviously be slower since you have to lift head and seek to new position.

Ok, so what are some real world sequential and random examples? Tried searching this online, hard to believe I couldn't find anything.

 

[sdifox]

Ok, so what are some real world sequential and random examples? Tried searching this online, hard to believe I couldn't find anything.

just download CrystalDiskMark and test your own hdd. You are overthinking this.