5400RPM vs 7200RPM?

A great speed increase can be had by using RAID 0 or RAID 0+1

Nightstalker wrote in post #11236833
A great speed increase can be had by using RAID 0 or RAID 0+1

5400rpm drives are generally used in laptops, to reduce power, or by "green" drives in desktops. Fitting an extra drive in a laptop can be problematic.

If you store a lot of data on your computer's hard disk, get the largest capacity first, then the fastest disk speed. A 1TB 5400RPM drive will be faster than a 320GB 7200RPM drive with 250GB of data on each. There's also a battery life/hard drive performance tradeoff you have to make.

OP still hasn't said if he's on a Laptop or Desktop though. Pretty basic question.

Nightstalker wrote in post #11237343
OP still hasn't said if he's on a Laptop or Desktop though. Pretty basic question.

I'm on a laptop. Will a faster hard drive, greatly affect battery life or anything else?

Yep, battery life will go down a bit. If you get the Momentus XT battery life may actually be improved, there's less disk movement and more coming from the SSD which takes less power. A full SSD is the ultimate in low power disks.

I upgraded the 120GB stock hitachi 5400 rpm travelstar in my 3 year old macbook to a 320gb WD scorpio black 7200rpm drive about half a year ago. Battery consumption is about the same (no significant difference), performance is significantly better.

In no small part this is due to having a ton of free space on the disk; SSD's are faster because of direct access and lack of mechanical motion. The outer portion of the hard disk platter is 'faster' than the inner tracks as it travels under the reader head faster than the inner tracks do for the same rotational speed. Hard drives slow down significantly as they fill up, because you've used the faster, outer track already. Some advocate only using a proportion of a disk's capacity if you're after performance - in other words, get much more space than you really need.

edmyloo wrote in post #11239256
I'm on a laptop. Will a faster hard drive, greatly affect battery life or anything else?

Battery life will be unaffected for all intents and purposes.

DigitalSpecialist wrote in post #11232653
If the 7200rpm isn't fast enough for you try SSDD. A 6.0gbs rate is incredible!

might be, but standards SSD(push about 260-300) don't reach that speed. maybe if you spend 1,000+ on PCI-E SSD.

mattia wrote in post #11240052
SSD's are faster because of direct access and lack of mechanical motion.

Same addressing scheme regardless of track and sector identification which promotes uniform read capabilities in terms of access time.

mattia wrote in post #11240052
The outer portion of the hard disk platter is 'faster' than the inner tracks as it travels under the reader head faster than the inner tracks do for the same rotational speed. Hard drives slow down significantly as they fill up, because you've used the faster, outer track already. Some advocate only using a proportion of a disk's capacity if you're after performance - in other words, get much more space than you really need.

a major factor when a disk fills up is that file sectors are not organized for speed. There are utilities for correcting inefficiencies in file sector management which in turn promotes faster reads.

Tony-S wrote in post #11240088
Battery life will be unaffected for all intents and purposes.

I went from a 200GB Fujitsu something-or-other to a 320GB WD Scorpio Black in a 2008 Macbook Pro. Battery life went down by almost an hour, maybe around 40-50 min.


A new drive will be faster than an old one simply because the files won't be as fragmented. This plays a big part in the perception of speed when someone installs a new hard drive...it's the speed of a fresh, unfragmented file system they're seeing, not necessarily the speed of the drive.

Finally, the 6 Gb/s rating in some drives is the SATA III specification, not the speed of the drive itself. No current drive, hard or solid state, will saturate even a 3 Gb/s SATA II connection by itself.

edmyloo wrote in post #11239256
I'm on a laptop. Will a faster hard drive, greatly affect battery life or anything else?

I notice no battery life decrease in my 2006 MBP when I went from the factory 80 GB 5400 rpm HDD to a Hitachi 500 GB 7200 rpm HDD.

Attached are my xBench scores (5400 rpm is on left, 7200 rpm is on right). You can see there's a decent performance jump between the two.

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Picked up a western digital 1.5tb 7200rpm sataII drive for $90 bucks a week or two ago. Prices are deff dropping like crazy. You guys in the US will have it cheaper surely!!!
Also picked up a 1tb seagate usb2 drive for 80 bucks!!!!!!!!!!!! CRAZY prizes.

toxic wrote in post #11241651
I went from a 200GB Fujitsu something-or-other to a 320GB WD Scorpio Black in a 2008 Macbook Pro. Battery life went down by almost an hour, maybe around 40-50 min.

There is something wrong with your install. I've moved to 7200 rpm drives and they have not meaningful impact on battery life.

Tony-S wrote in post #11245677
There is something wrong with your install. I've moved to 7200 rpm drives and they have not meaningful impact on battery life.

How can something be "wrong" with an install? A hard drive works or it doesn't. There's nothing you can do to plug a hard drive in wrong and make it use more power.

What's more likely is that your computers weren't using power-efficient drives to begin with, and/or mine was, and the power consumption of a Scorpio Black is simply that much greater. Either that or you haven't been using high-performance hard drives like that Black is supposed to be...