hard drive performance comparison: 750GB 7200-rpm w/32GB mSATA vs. 1 TB 5400-rpm w/32GB mSATA

Can the relative performances of the following two hard drives be inferred?

750GB 7200-rpm hard disk drive w/32GB mSATA solid-state cached drive
and
1 TB 5400-rpm hard disk drive w/32GB mSATA solid-state cached drive

I am interested to know if the addition of the solid-state cached drive to each hard disk drive closes the performance gap between the two drives. I realize other variables may be present that make comparing performances difficult.

Thanks for reading and any information and comments.

 

This is easy; if the workload presented/tested that stresses the storage subsystem can be contained in the mSATA SSD's - there will be no performance difference between the two HDD's - all else being equal.

If however, the workload presented/tested that stresses the storage subsystem cannot be contained in the mSATA SSD (and this will be true in most of the real world usage model) then the performance 'win' will go to the 7200RPM HDD.

The only criteria here is: do you want performance (get the smaller, 7200RPM HDD) or the capacity (get the up to ~60% slower in real world use 5400RPM HDD). Not even the slight data density advantage of the bigger drive will negate the RPM advantage the smaller drive offers.

This is for O/S usage scenarios - if we were talking strictly use as data storage drives: get the bigger one (the performance delta is negligible in all modern O/S's and programs when simply 'loading' the data - but the 'editing/temp file/scratch disk' is done on a faster storage subsystem.

Hope this helps.

Take care.