7200 RPM harddrive

Anyone know when dell will offer these 7200rpm again? If not what are someone's options if they must have a 7200rpm drive? I got lucky and got my 1505 with a 80GB 7200 and my wife wants one but wont settle for the 5400rpm and I don't blame her.

 

Unless she is a demanding user who plays alot of games and uses intensive software she will never notice the difference.

 

She knows her hardware to good to settle for a 5400. She also works with large files and the transfer times for t 5400 take way too long. I run a computer lab and we set up a 2GB file transfer of a 7200 to another 7200 and a 5400 to another 5400 and the 7200 transfered in about 5 or 6 minutes or less and the 5400 took more then 20 minutes. I am hoping that someone here might have bought a 7200rpm of tigerdirect of newegg and can let me know or else dell starts supplying them again.

 

I agree. The 120GB and 160GB 5400rpm drives are nearly as fast as the smaller 7200rpm drives like the 60GB and 80GB and they offer far more storage. You won't notice a real difference in performance. Most people that think the 7200rpm drives are so fast is because they've never even used the larger 5400rpm drives that are available now. If you're coming from a 40-60GB 5400rpm drive then sure it's going to seem fast to get a 100GB 7200rpm. I've had two Hitachi 7200rpm drives and i wasn't all that horribly impressed really. They're primarily just louder, hotter, and use more power. If she wants the best performance along with storage she should look at the new perpendicular 5400rpm drives which come in 160GB currently and Dell now offers them. I just received an E1505 today with one.

 

Ither your watch went dead for a while on the 5400rpm drive test or you tested an extremely slow 5400rpm drive and not one of the newer Hitachi or Seagate 5400rpm drives.

http://www.laptoplogic.com/reviews/detail.php?id=92&part=full&page=13

 

The test was ran on dell and gateway desktop computers about a year and 1/2 to two years ago. If enough people agree that there is no noticable difference I may just order her one and if she is unhappy trade her my 7200 hard drive for the 120-160 5400. To me running on a 5400 rpm would seem like runing one of the linux distros that run from the cd-rom. The cd-rom distros are as slow as Moses.

 

You won't notice much of a difference. The speed differences between that sized 5400rpm drive vs. a 7200 are negligible for most computing tasks. If she plans on gaming or transferring a lot of data all of the time, then you’d notice the difference in speed. Your OS will not run like a live cd.

 

I've been opting for the 5400rpm drives in all the laptops i've ordered recently and i'm used to desktop performance for the hard drives and i'm also a performance hound but i'm satisfied with the performance of the larger 120GB and up 5400rpm drives because their arial density makes up for the slower spindle speed a lot. I'd rather pay less and get more storage then pay more and get less storage for a little better performance. That's probably why i build desktops with 250GB+ 7200rpm drives instead of 36GB raptors.

 

You should be happy with the modern 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM hard drives, then. Either should be able to copy 2 GB of data substantially faster than that. Modern 2.5" hard drives (even of the 5400 RPM variety) can easily maintain more than your measured 5.7 MB/sec transfer rates. Several times faster, in fact. And your 20 minutes means your 5400 RPM drives were providing about 1.7 MB/sec. They must have been REALLY old disks to go that slowly. It must be the better part of a decade since hard drives were that slow.

Are you sure you had DMA enabled on the drives? Are you sure they were on separate channels?

 

Just a question that is kinda off topic, but do the 7200 RPM drives produce more heat then the 5400? Because I have a 7200 and theres times when it gets VERY hot.

 

Yes. As a result of the hd running at higher speeds, its getter hotter than 5400 rpm drives.

 

The 5400 drive wasn’t that old. About a year and ½ to 2 years ago we got four new gateway computers in the lab for the graphics students and they were suppose to be high end machines. I noticed during installation that something was wrong because they were unusually slow compared to all other computers I have used. I checked and the UDMA was enabled and everything seemed in order so I preformed the data test I posted about. I pulled the hard drives and replaced them with some we had ordered for backup and while looking closely at the drives I noticed the drives from the gateways had 5400 rpm marked on them and the replacement drives had 7200 rpm marked on the drives or boxes they came in.

 

next I'll hear that 5400rpm drives are as fast as Raptors.

 

A lot of heated discussion going on over 5400 RPM vs 7200RPM drives.
Since notebooks have become so powerful, I woul like to move small oracle, SQL Server databses (for test purposes only) on to a new HP dv9000t (not yet purchased). Traditionally, I have used nothing less than a 7200 RPM drives. Besdies on servers you get SCSI or prop storage devices.
Now that I intend to do testing on dv9000t or E1705, I would like to know if there would be a big diff in Database queries. How much of a difference would these drivers make: 160GB perpendicular vs 100 7200 RPM ?

Any comments ?


BGeo.