Why all the Green/5400rpm hard drives these days?

[duragezic]

I've been putting off getting a new hard drive for months because everytime I went to look at Newegg, at the 1.5 or 2 TB internal drives, the majority would be 5400rpm/WD green garbage.

I currently have a Samsung Spinpoint F1 500gb and it's perfect. I'm only looking for roughly a 2 TB updated version of the same drive. They do have a highly rated one but it's 5900rpm.

Browsing the current Newegg specials, I can get a WD Black 7200rpm 1.5 TB for $100 or a Seagate 2 TB 5900rpm for $90. Did all the manufacturers go to this two tier system, so they can get the "performance" users who didn't want to spend money on a Raptor?

Reading here, it seems these 5400/5900rpm drives are perfectly fine for storage when paired with a SSD for OS/apps/games. But any SSD for me is like a year away, so I'd like to keep a nice fast drive for my OS/games. Would a current 5400rpm drive be slower than my F1 500gb 7200rpm drive?

 

[duragezic]

I understand the advantages of the "green" drives, in that they are cooler, quieter, and use less power. But with my current Samsung F1, I can barely hear it and any more heat/power due to is not going to make a difference for me. To me, hard drives have been getting quieter and quieter as the years went on, even with them all being 7200rpm.

 

[Compman55]

A new green drive is still going to perform better than an older IDE or very early SATA. But there is no match for a 7200RPM+ desktop drive. Yes my vote is for now, spend the money of a 7200 until the price and capacity of SSD evens out.

I am holding off because the capacity is too small.

 

[fuzzymath10]

Unless you're counting each MB/sec, they all perform broadly similarly as a boot drive regardless of RPM. Sure, one might top out at 130MB/sec and another might top out at 90MB/sec, but in typical use I'm seeing 0-5MB/sec because of random access on any hard drive I have. For sequential access, 7200rpm drives are better, but it only makes a difference if you're moving huge files around frequently, which is not often for me. A 500MB file might take 10 seconds vs 12 seconds to move.

(BTW my random i/o speeds for my SSDs are around 10-50MB/sec just to emphasize how much of an improvement they are)

I agree that my 7200rpm drives aren't any noisier. They do run a few degrees hotter and use a few more watts but these aren't huge issues.

 

[Idontcare]

Why all the Green/5400rpm hard drives these days?

It was a marketing ploy that enabled them to bootstrap their cheaper-to-produce harddrives onto the existing "go green" fad that transpired with oil reaching $140 per barrel.

How do you make cheap become chic? Tie it to a fad and add a marketing slogan.

 

[frostedflakes]

Meh, I wouldn't really call it a fad. Green drives have a lot of tangible benefits, lower noise and vibration being the most important to me. It used to be that people who wanted a quiet PC had to resort to buying laptop drives to get low noise, but thanks in large part to low RPM desktop drives, you can now have a quiet HDD and not have to sacrifice storage by moving to a 2.5" drive. Plus they tend to be cheaper than 7200RPM drives, and have more than enough performance just for file storage. Since I have an SSD for OS/programs and just use HDD for storing media, RPM is pretty worthless to me. What matters most is low noise and price per GB.

 

[Zap]

everytime I went to look at Newegg, at the 1.5 or 2 TB internal drives, the majority would be 5400rpm/WD green garbage.

"Green" drives have their place. If you want large 7200 RPM drives, they do exist. In fact, I see Seagate and WD at 1.5TB and Seagate, WD and Hitachi at 2TB for 7200RPM drives. Hitachi also is releasing a 3TB 7200RPM drive. I don't see a problem with availability, unless you want it to be a Samsung like your current drive. Samsung has traditionally been a step behind in capacity, probably because they tend to use fewer platters. Traditionally Hitachi uses 5 platters at the top end, and indeed their upcoming 3TB uses 5 platters. Most companies max at 4 platters, but Samsung usually doesn't go above 3 platters.

 

[boomhower]

Personally, I don't have a need for a 2TB boot drive. An SSD with large low RPM data drive makes perfect sense. If you have the need for a 2TB boot disk there are several options out there. An SSD is the single best piece of computer hardware I have every bought. The only thing that even comes close is my first dual core CPU.

 

[Voo]

The question is what are the advantages of 7.2k rpm for large mass storage drives? For me personally I don't notice the difference at all, because modern 5.4k rpm drives have high enough sequential r/w and I don't need random access for movies or pictures.

 

[Nothinman]

The question is what are the advantages of 7.2k rpm for large mass storage drives? For me personally I don't notice the difference at all, because modern 5.4k rpm drives have high enough sequential r/w and I don't need random access for movies or pictures.

Exactly, for a boot/OS drive the seek time matters a lot more than for pure storage.

 

[Emulex]

whats the point of ssd? or 15K?

oh yeah i do work where time is money (sarcasm intended).

 

[Voo]

whats the point of ssd? or 15K?

oh yeah i do work where time is money (sarcasm intended).

Ok so where exactly do you notice the difference between a SSD and a 5.4k rpm drive when playing a movie from the drive?

For a boot/app drive seek time IS important, wouldn't want to give away my SSD, but for mass storage? 5.4k rpm are good enough.

 

[ilkhan]

Fast HDDs have largely been replaced by SSDs, and mechanical HDDs relegated to storage duty (which doesn't need speed). There are still some fast and big HDDs out there, but they don't fit the usage model thats evolving.

 

[Soulkeeper]

I'm in the same boat as the op
Waiting for a refresh on the wd blacks, or someone else with 1 or 2 of the highest density platters (~667GB or 750GB) spinning at 7200rpm.
Two 1.2 to 1.5TB drives at 7200rpm is what i'd like to buy right now to replace my two 320GB 7200rpm drives.

 

[taltamir]

It was a marketing ploy that enabled them to bootstrap their cheaper-to-produce harddrives onto the existing "go green" fad that transpired with oil reaching $140 per barrel.

How do you make cheap become chic? Tie it to a fad and add a marketing slogan.

exactly... those exact same drives were being sold as "cheappy mccheap edition" for years before someone decided to strap the name "green" to it.
5400 drives are just cheaper to make, and run cooler, and consume less power... perfect for a budget storage device where money is tight.

 

[hackmole]

What I don't see anyone mentioning is backup. Some of you have an SSD and then use a green drive for storage. Problem is that you could fill up an SSD pretty quick. Once your SD is filled up there would be no backup because all your originals would then have to go on the green drive.

What I am trying to say is would it not be better to have a configuration of two large drives using one to backup everything from the other. The chances of both drives breaking down at the same time are pretty remote. If one breaks down, you'd still have all your stuff on the other. And it would be better than spending hundreds of hours burning backups to discs.

 

[taltamir]

What I don't see anyone mentioning is backup. Some of you have an SSD and then use a green drive for storage. Problem is that you could fill up an SSD pretty quick. Once your SD is filled up there would be no backup because all your originals would then have to go on the green drive

This is a false dichotomy.

You present it as if the choice is:
1. small SSD + Green drive for data with no backup
2. 2 green drives, one for storing data, one for backing.

when in reality anyone who can afford an SSD could easily afford:
small SSD + 2 green drives, one for storing data, one for backup.

 

[hackmole]

Yes, but not one person here has said that that is what they are doing and so I have to assume they are not keeping an extra drive for backup.

 

[RebateMonger]

Given the high density of the latest "big" hard drives. running them at slower than 7200 RPM probably enhances reliability, which has become a MAJOR stumbling block for disk makers. The high disk densities mean performance of the slower-spinning disks is still as good as older 7200 RPM drives while holding down the expense of building and warrantying the drives.

 

[Tsavo]

I'm in the same boat as the op
Waiting for a refresh on the wd blacks, or someone else with 1 or 2 of the highest density platters (~667GB or 750GB) spinning at 7200rpm.
Two 1.2 to 1.5TB drives at 7200rpm is what i'd like to buy right now to replace my two 320GB 7200rpm drives.

They refreshed the blacks like 6 months ago. Grab a Samsung F3 1TB and go nuts. It'll eviscerate your 320's in terms of performance.

 

[taltamir]

Yes, but not one person here has said that that is what they are doing and so I have to assume they are not keeping an extra drive for backup.

thats a silly assumption...
And FYI, I got an SSD + HDD and I back everything up (to NAS)

I would guess that there isn't a single person who will chose to forgo backup BECAUSE they got an SSD ... the two are unrelated and it makes no sense. anyone who would keep a backup without SSD will keep backups with SSD.

 

[Blain]

Why all the Green/5400rpm hard drives these days?

It's marketing hype to make people think they are helping to save the planet.
Well if people feel better about themselves using 5400 vs 7200rpm HDs...
More power to them! :\

 

[duragezic]

Lots of good replies here. And I didn't think anything about reliability.

I was kind of leaning towards a Samsung as my Seagate drive has had weird problems but you know I don't think it's indicative of any real problem. I think I'll try to go for a nice 1.5-2 TB 7200rpm drive but if there is a big price increase or whatever, I could probably make do with a "green" drive. From my knowledge of average 7200rpm drives, even though they just tend to increase in size, their general performance also increases even at the same RPM.

 

[Tsavo]

Lots of good replies here. And I didn't think anything about reliability.

I was kind of leaning towards a Samsung as my Seagate drive has had weird problems but you know I don't think it's indicative of any real problem. I think I'll try to go for a nice 1.5-2 TB 7200rpm drive but if there is a big price increase or whatever, I could probably make do with a "green" drive. From my knowledge of average 7200rpm drives, even though they just tend to increase in size, their general performance also increases even at the same RPM.

I wouldn't get a 5400 RPM drive for anything other than backup duty.

 

[ksec]

Well i would like them actually make a 4500 RPM Green HDD if they save even more power and be more reliable.

I no longer need the speed from my HDD. I use SSD for that. HDD is mainly used for RAID Storage and getting a few Green and Slow HDD together is fast enough on Gigabit Ethernet access.