Do HD speeds really matter???

I was recently informed that the difference between a 7200rpm drive and a 4200rpm drive is only a few milliseconds difference in latency and fetch. That seems imperceptible to the average person.

So does it really make a difference? Should we really make the effort to replace our standard HD options that come with the laptop with a faster one???

 

depends, if lappy, the 4200 will use less battery, and depends what ur using it for

 

I heard it improves loading times among games and apps, as well as faster video editing and tasks like that. But personally I really don't know, the 5400rpm drive I used to have was fast enough and I didn't see any reason to upgrade. But games and such would probably load quicker. As for 4200rpm drives I think an upgrade should take place. When i see options for a 4200rpm drive on websites its usually associated with a larger hard drive. But I think you should see a significant speed difference from 4200rpm to 7200rpm drives when it comes to certain tasks.

Hope that helps

 

For modern OS(especially Vista), it does. The same reason most server installations need to pay the heavy price of 15K SCSI320. The HD is the achilles heel of a heavily multi-tasked installation and we are seeing more and more of them(superfetch, search indexing etc. all constantly bang the disk in the background).

 

Depends on how often it happens.
If an application, while loading, requires 10,000 separate loads, then even a difference of 1ms would mean a total difference in load time of 10 seconds.

And similarly, once the application is loaded, you might not need to access the harddrive at all, so the millisecond difference disappears completely.
So really, it depends on how you use your computer.

 

And in addition to the latency (access time) difference, there's also a difference in throughput (megabytes per second). And how many milliseconds -- or seconds -- that adds up to just depends on how much data you're loading.

 

what harddrives are you looking at?

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but for common PC maintenance tasks like scandisk and defrag wouldn't a 7200rpm drive finish the job faster than 4200 or 5400rpm drives? It would make a difference in terms of hours if capacities were 160GB and above.

 

Edit: Double posted

 

If your common maintenance tasks takes hours, there is something wrong.

Anyway, I didn't have the option of 7200rpm with the notebook I am getting but because it is a notebook, it is no problem, an estimated extra 15-20 mins. battery life with a 5400 rpm drive, fair compromise. So yes, drive speeds matter, especially on desktops, but for a notebook, particularly if you travel, less is fine.

 

The main problems I mentioned earlier would be defrag and the occasional scandisk, both of which could potentially take hours on large laptop HDDs.

 

I never defrag or scandisk on my 7/8 years old Dell and it runs just fine and is wondering what is the purpose of that ?

 

Good for you, I need the feature since I like having windows and games load faster and I like knowing when my HDD starts ageing when bad sectors show up during the scandisk scan.

 

My experience with scandisk(on another machine which shows problem) is that it doesn't really help as once the HD signals problem, the best course of action is to change it(that HD finally dies).

As for defrag and loading things faster, I have not done anything so can't comment if it really is faster after defrag.

 

If you've never defragged a HDD before, that's your choice. I've always found that after the first defrag on a HDD with lots of changes in file structure loading and access speeds increase noticeably.

 

If you try to copy a large file, say a DVD ISO, to a 4200 rpm drive vs a 7200 rpm drive, then it makes a noticeable difference, IMHO. In general, 7200 rpm drives are faster in real life especially when seeking from different tracks, regardless of published paper specs. (Millisecs are still an eternity as far as the computer itself is concerned)

Sometime ago, I did a streamlined XP install on a friend's Acer laptop with a 4200 rpm drive, and it took all of forever to complete, compared to the 15 mins or less it takes on my desktop (Seagate 7200.10 7200rpm drive), although the CPUs were comparable. So, with my crude, unscientific test, I'd have to say, yes, it makes a difference. Also, I'd guess that the drive cache would play a big role in the overall drive performance, though I don't know what the Acer's cache was.

As for defragmentation, I never have to worry about the time it takes to 'complete' because I run a fully automatic defragger. It defrags whenever required during system idle (on AC power only, for the notebook), thereby saving time that would have to be spent defagging via a preset schedule or (gasp!) manually.

I'd also guess that virus scans and disk checking would be faster with a 7200 rpm drive vs a 4200 rpm drive. After all, even on the desktop segment, other factors remaining static, drive performance generally increases with speed: 10krpm > 7.2krpm > 5.4k rpm.

 

From my own experience 5400rpm drive is noticebly faster than 4200.
And 7200 drive would be about twice faster than 4200.
So speed difference is MAJOR. I would not recommend 4200 rpm drive.
New 7200rpm drives are also very efficient (consume not more energy than 5400 and are as silent).

 

5400 or 7200 is good, 4200s are noticeably slow.

 

You should get the faster harddrive, who cares about power consumption, a few watts should only mean 10 minutes of battery life.
The 7200rpm hdd will definitely get hotter than a 4200rpm one.

I have 2 Hitachi 7K200 hdd's in Raid 0 in my Voodoo, and I still want more power.

K-TRON

 

Unless you're hurting for cash, avoid the 4,200rpm like the plague. And if you are indeed hurting for cash, you probably shouldn't be buying a notebook in the first place.

To put an even more blunt point on it, buy the 5,400rpm or the 7,200rpm if it is available.

 

I have a 100gb 7200rpm drive in my 8510p, as opposed to the default 160gb 5400rpm. Battery life change? Negligible. Mainly because at idle (which is what your system does 90%-95% of the time), the extra power consumed is about 0.1W. Hard seeks do consume more, but only in the nature of 0.8W momentarily.
Hard seeks kill battery life regardless anyway, so you're mincing minutes.

I've replaced the default 4200 or 5400 drives in a couple laptops now, and have not noticed actual measurable battery life decline. The larger number of 7200 just generally leads people to that conclusion. I much prefer the 7200 over the preconceived notion that it actually kills battery life even fractionally noticeable.

 

I have a good fast 5400.3 seagate momentus in my L100 which makes all the difference over a slow rubbishy fujitsu 5400rpm drive and they are the same rpm and interface. Difference drive to drive at the same rpm can be quite a lot so a good 7200 over a bad 4200 would make a huge difference.

 

You also have a 5400.3? How large?

Performance isn't only about drive speed. A 160GB 5400RPM drive performs close to a 100GB 7200RPM. Why? Higher density.

 

RPMs don't make the drive, just the efficiency of it. A high efficiency 5400RPM can outperform a low end 7200, and has been proven in tests. A lot of factors come into play - as fabarati pointed out, density of the platter, the cache, the drive controller, all those things come into play.

Performance benchmarks can tell a story where marketing numbers can't. It's a lot like cameras - people tend to look at the megapixel of the camera as the big factor, but so much more comes into play.

 

Can I ask how we can now throw speeds of SSDs into the mix? And then to carry it one further, how would the fact that the current MTron being twice as fast with half the access time of all the others add to that yet?

So, I guess what Im trying to get at is...do we pick apart a certain part of performance to judge the HD/SSD, or the overall performance lumped in? Would we then simply go by a score say on...PCMark05?

And Im following this thread with interest because...Ive already done a HD/SSD comparison but I also have two other Units on their way (MTron/Samsung) and am wondering the best way to compare them.

It was so much simpler when I could just say...wow this is so much faster.

 

I would be interested to see the HDTune graph for the 160gb 5400.3. They're only $15 more than a 100gb Seagate 7200.1, and from what I read, not as slow as a regular 5400rpm in comparison.


That's a 7200.1 100gb in a 8510p for referral.

 

I can show you a momentus 5400.3 120GB HD tune report.

 

How long have you had it, and has it been holding up well? I notice you have the 822AS and was wondering if it was as problematic as the older 821A model..............

 

I've had it since early january, and it's quite reliable. That's an old benchmark though. So I don't know if performance is still the same. Should be though,

 

Thanks. I was thinking about getting it to use as an external backup......

 

Here's the one i did just now.
I haven't defragged in a while, but the windows tool says that I don't need it.

 

Interesting to note that your burst rate is higher than that of my 7200.2 of the same size (120GB). Possibly a SATA controller limitation, and not the drive itself?

 

Possibly. Since they're both perpendicular recording and yours is SATA300 (though you're laptop's likely not), that's the only think I can think of as well. Other than the fact of what you were doing while testing

 

Yeah, I left the jumper factory set for SATA150 (since I don't think 300 will work with my HP laptop).

 

Well, I've bought a new HDD, a 250GB Samsung drive. I should get it tomorrow.

 

Let us know how it goes. Since I seem to be rapidly running out of space on my internal 120, a future upgrade to a 250GB 5400 will likely be in order. I think the Samsung and WD models are the only game in town........

 

My feelings exactly. I just read the Toms Hardware review. It's quite a fast HDD.

And the interface performance for my 5400.3 is faster than a 160GB 7200.2.

 

I just hope my BIOS recognizes a 250GB drive, as my dv6400 is the predecessor to the model they are selling now (dv6500).

I guess I'll find out.

 

Same here.