5400rpm vs. 7200rpm

[munki]

I found two deals on pricewatch.com for hard drives. I want a 40 gig but I'm having trouble deciding on what speed. The 5400rpm one is $78 and the 7200rpm is $104. I just wanted to ask some people that probably have seen the difference first hand. Is 7200 worth the extra thirty bucks?

I really would like faster performance for games (HL/TFC/CS/Q3/UT) so my bet is with the 7200. But I've just never had the chance to compare for myself.

Thanks,
Justin

 

[GHz]

Yes get the 7200RPM Hard drive. Keeping it simple, yes a 7200RPM hard drive does give noticable improvement over the older 5400RPM hard drives.

 

[BCYL]

yes, it makes a noticable difference... get the 7200rpm HD, esp when u are into games...

 

[HappyFace]

For $3 more, go with the 40GB Deskstar 60GXP 7200RPM Drive at newegg. The 60GXP is a very fast, quiet, and reliable drive. Not only that, but IBM warranties the drive for 3 years!

 

[4824guy]

YES. It is worth it to have a 7200 HD for you bootup drive over a older 5400 rpm drive. If you are just using the HD for storage, then it doesn't matter.

 

[Sundog]

<< If you are just using the HD for storage, then it doesn't matter. >>


Exactly, storage isn't worth the extra money.






Maybe I should follow my own advice!

 

[SCSIRAID]

Another yes for the 7200...... I like IBM

 

[Dufusyte]

HD speed makes very little difference in games. At most, the map will load up a bit faster at the start of the round. That's about it.

Actually, maps will load faster if you get a faster CPU. When reading data from a HD, alot of times it is the CPU that is the real bottleneck (strange but true).

Take a look at a System Resource Meter (like this one) and you will see that during a large read from the HD, the CPU maxes out at 100%. This means the CPU is the bottleneck processing the data coming off the HD, and not the HD's transfer rate itself.

 

[MrMojo]

If you're more concerned about quiteness than a small bit of speed get a 5400rpm drive, they're noticeably quieter.

 

[kylef]

Make sure that the drives have the same platter configuration (platter density) before assuming that the 7200 RPM drive will be faster than the 5400 RPM drive. I've seen 5400 RPM drives blow away 7200 RPM drives in throughput just because the 5400 drive had platter densities about 2 times higher than the 7200 RPM drive...

 

[ElFenix]

if you have 256 megs of RAM the game isn't even touching your hard drive while playing.

 

[Quickfingerz]

Yes, 7200 RPM is worth it. If it's too loud, there are hard drive coolers that supress noise. All Budget systems that I build use 7200 RPM drives. this is because for most computer usage, the amount of ram and hard drive speed make the true difference in noticable speed. a 233 Mhz with a 60GXP will ALWAYS beat out a 1.4 GHz system with a low platter density, small hard drive in the boot up of the OS as well as most games.

 

[kgraeme]

I just &quot;downgraded&quot; from a WD400 7200rpm drive to a Fujitsu 5400Rrpm drive. The reason was I needed quiet. I don't notice any difference in speed, and the review I read at Tom's Hardware even has it beating the 7200rpm drive in some cases.

 

[CyrixMII333]

I have a Seagate 40gig 5400rpm medalist that give performance much like 7200 rpm. Speed is very noticeable vs other 5400rpm drive. I guess this is the fastest 5400 rpm I have used so far which get like 24000 score in sandra2001 benchtest while the maxtor 5400 rpm drive are only half as fast. Could have something to do with ata100 that boost it performance greatly, therefore removing any bottleneck that it had?

 

[TunaBoo]

No ata 100 may help 7200's during certain boost situations. AFAIK it will help the 5400 under LESS situations, as it is MUCH less likely to burst over 66 MB/S

 

[chuckieland]

yes 7200rpm worth the extra money
i would get a smaller 7200rpm for your Main drive that do bootup and game
and get another 5400rpm large harddrive just for storage
or is it cheaper to just get a large 7200rpm now?

 

[snidy]

I agree that 7200 is noticable in gaming

 

[JoPalm]

Yes the 7200rpm is FASTER!!!! I went from a 4800rpm (still using it to run win98) HD to a 7200rpm IBM HD and WOW can you so tell the difference!!!! Not kidding.

 

[ElFenix]

folks, unless you don't have much RAM, you really need to take a look at what your harddrive is doing in HL, TFC, CS, Q3, and UT. for the most part, absolutely nothing. it sits there. windows might think its a good time to do some file maintenence and thats it. unless you're loading a level the hard drive isn't used at all. (unless of course you have <192 megs of RAM)

oh, and CyrixMII333, sisoft sandra is possibly the WORST hard drive benchmark on the planet. its a nice memory bench, and thats all it should be used for.

 

[Bozo Galora]

good info on this subject