5200 vs. 7200 RPM HDD
 

I was wondering if the extra 2000 RPM is really a big boost in performance.

Here's the story...

I just bought a 120 GB drive from Tiger Direct for $49.00 after the rebate. I thought... hell yea! Great price. But when I was reading the order confirmation, I saw that it is only a 5200 RPM drive :(

I tried to canel the order, but it had already shipped. My plan is to use it as my primary drive, but I am concerned that the slower drive will slow my machine down significantly.

My basic specs are as follows:

AMD XP 2000 (1.86 GHz)
512 MB DDR 400 Ram
Gforce 4 128 DDR video card

Obviously the slower drive will effect performance, but I'm just wondering how much?

I noticed a huge difference going from my 5200 40gb to a 7200 60gb drive. For gaming, programming, etc its critical to have a faster drive otherwise you are gonna sit there alot waiting for things to load.

5200 will work, but after going 7200, I think that Id use any 5200 drive for filesharing for the box in the corner. Share out some mp3s or something :)

Let me ask you this, do you notice a 1800rpm difference in your engine? Essentially the same concept. Sure, 7200rpm is going to be faster.

Also, it's 5400 rpm, not 5200.

I know it's faster, I was just wondering how much faster... and if that amount would be significant.

Thanks for the opinion, asshopo.

bendley... no reason to be flippant.

I was making an analogy. Yes, you should notice the difference between the two speeds. I was not trying to show disrespectful levity, I apologize if it sounded that way.

No sweat, dude. I was just being self concious... kindof a dumb question... heh... of course it gonna run faster. DUH! Besides, I'm probably overy sesitive. I was just hoping for a bit more than "yeah... it's gonna be faster".

I'm trying to justify keeping it, but I don't think it's gonna happen. Guess I'll return it and get a 7200 RPM HDD. To bad, too. Twus a hellova price.

I'd return it too. As they said, if the deals too good to be true it probably is. When looking for another HD a while back all the GREAT deals where 5400rpm hard drive.

120 gigs for 50 bucks is still not bad, got a Tivo? Stick it in there 5400 or 7200 make no difference in them..

I think the loading time in games and Windows boot up will be a couple of seconds longer .

I upgraded from a 5400 to a 7200 RPM HDD this past summer and my PC got way faster. There's a huge difference in performance. I didn't think there would be, but damn! I'd send it back.

-Lasereth

Dunno... may stick it in a file server or something.

I have already bought another one: 40GB, 7200 with 8MB Buffer. Got it at NewEgg for like $56.00 including shipping (thanks bendsly for the NewEgg tip).

How much do y'all think the extra 6 MB of Buffer will increase performance?

So. let me ask you this then, do you notice the difference between $2 and $8 in your wallet? hah, analogy again, but funny.

The cache is there basically for queuing purposes. The hdd holds info in the cache for very quick access (like, on demand). The more cache you have, the more efficient the process becomes. Most drives today I believe are coming with 8mb of cache on them. If it's coming with 8mb of cache, this is a good thing!

Hell, until recetly, I never even knew they had a cache. I figured it would be worth the extra 20 bucks or whatever it was.

It really depends on how you use your machine. Basically, what happens is this... in relative computer times, it takes absolutely forever for your harddrive heads to go out and seek data. So, what the manufacturers have done is implemented a caching mechanism that guesses what data your computer is going to ask for next, and stores it in high speed RAM. If the caching algorithm was correct, your data gets served up much faster than had it gone out and seek'ed the data. Since analogies are so popular in this thread :), it would be the same idea as memorizing a phone number instead of having to look it up in the phone book every time you need to make a call.

Now, is 8MB really better than 2MB? Yes, you see, with an 8MB cache, theoretically there is a 4x better chance that the drive will have cached the data your computer will ask for next, and thus, speed things up 4x. Heh, it doesn't actually work that way though... and you will realistically get only a fraction of that many more cache hits.

So, is it faster... yes. Will you actually notice the difference ... probably not. At least, you won't notice the cache size nearly as much as you would a difference in RPMs.

Another thing, why are you going with such a small HDD? 40GB isn't that big. For an extra $20, you could quadruple the storage capacity.

Yeah, good questions. One of which I have asked my self.

I mainly use my machine for gaming and surfing. And I don't keep games around. Once I am finished playing it, I uninstall it. I'm not big on the replay of games.

I currently have a 20 GB primary drive and a 40 GB Raid (mirrored) that hosts the "My Documents" folder. I keep basically nothing on the primary drive except for the OS and installed programs. Once I DL something, I move it over to the RAID. I have lost too much data in the past to not archive on the RAID.

The only reason I bought the 120 in the first place was because it was so freaking cheap. The only reason I'm upgrading is because I'm down to about 3 GB free space on my C drive. It has taken me almost 2 years to get this full, so I think the 40 Gig drive should be enough to keep me content until I build my next machine.

You will see your greatest performance boost using the 7200 RPM drives, 10k RPM SCSI, or the newer SATA drives withing a RAID0 configuration. Keep in mind that RAID0 does have some drawbacks.

I have (4) EIDE 80-GB WD SE drives in a RAID0 configuration. I like the performance kick. Sure, if a drive craters, I have data loss. That is what your backup plan is for if you are storing large amounts of critical data. I use Veritas BUE at my house with and SDLT drive. I also have another WD SE drive in the 250-GB size just to store an extra archive copy of important data.

2 10ks on Raid config /drool.

But anyhow for 50 bucks I would say keep it for media storage and you could go for a smaller 7200 for gaming, commonly used apps, ect.

does 5400 vs 7200 have a difference on realiability or lack of crashing?

I personally use some sort of extra cooling on the 7200 drives.

The ATA drives do not have any difference on reliability. SCSI however does, because each drive is actually hand-touched and checked/benchmarked (hence one of the reasons they're more expensive). But, they also usually have a better warranty as well.