Hard Disk - RPM question

thegills

Guys and Gals. What are the main differences between a 5400rpm and 7200rpm hard disk. How much is one worse that the other ??

Gaz

Ehhh about 1800rpm's

One reads info faster than the other, this is important if you do alot of hard drive intensive apps , things like image rendering and so on , if your just a normal user you wont really notice the difference.

strat

i had a 30 gig 5400 and i bought a 60 gig 7200rpm drive
and its about twice as fast in my oppinion

making ISO's takes less than half he time
large programs and games load much qucker too

that said they are more exspensive and if the drive is more for storage of say music/films/backups then go for the cheaper 5400

if its a os/system/games/programs disk your after then get the faster one

Gerry

There are many other factors which determine hard drive performance, so its not a good generalisation to say that a 7200 is twice as fast.

All other things being equal, its going to be roughly 33% faster, but this could vary a lot either way if you are comparing 2 different makes or generations of drive.

Different makes have different strengths, for example the ibm firmware and mechanism gives it good access times, and excellent performance under heavy load.

The western digital is more concentrated on achieving high transfer rates.

For a boot drive, there is no excuse not to get a 7200 rpm drive, the hard drive is the slowest thing in your system, so you should make it as fast as possible.