Does the rpm of the hard drive affect the overall performance of the pc?

Question

Can you really notice the poor performance? So which should I consider, a bigger hd capacity or faster rpm? Is it really worth giving up a couple of gb for my pc?

Answer 1

wow, all those answers and only one got it right. It affects how programs load and saved to the harddrive and NOTHING else. One exception is if the harddrive is used as memory (virtual memory) because there's not enough regular memory in the computer.
Here's a chart for performance:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html?modelx=33&model1=117&model2=676&chart=34
Notice, there's not that much difference. Like loading win xp, it's only going to add 1 second to a max of 6 seconds to the time. not really a difference.

Now if you're using the harddrive as memory (virtual memory), adding regular memory can speed it up 10-20% faster.

Answer 2

Yes. the RPM's of a hard drive impact the performance. The faster the rotation the more data can be written/read. There are other factors that come in as well. Two 7,200 rpm hard drives from different companies are not exactly the same in performance. They all differ....But a 7,200 rpm hard drive is indefinitely better then a 5,400 rpm drive. Same goes with 10k rpms to 7,200. The technology is also a factor depending how old a drive is. A new hard drive from the same company will perform better from it's older counterpart in most cases but not all.

But yes...RPM's of a drive are a big factor in performance. From the speed of your computer startup, to saving or copying files from one drive to another.

Answer 3

Generally, yes. The faster the drive spins, the faster it can read the data from the platters and the faster it can transfer that data to the CPU. Since the CPU is so much faster than other components including the hard drive, it spends much of its time waiting. The sooner the hard drive (or any other device, for that matter) can get the data thats needed, the better.

Answer 4

Yes it does. Most desktop hard drives run at 7,200 rpm while most laptop hard drives run at 5,400 rpm. Everything else being equal, you can definitely see a difference between the hard drive speed. High end hard drives run at 10,000 rpm. It is hard to quantify precisely how much a difference in hard drive speed can affect a computer's performance. However, you will see a noticeable difference.

Answer 5

Hi. Yes. A faster RPM means more "disk" is available in the same time. Some run at 10,000 RPM. Soon you may have solid state "disks" and holographic storage and the spinning of disks will seem quaint. Like my vinyl LPs!

Answer 6

Overall, not that big an effect. The faster the drive goes the faster programs and files will open but once they are open there is little effect unless you have a large page file.

Answer 7

Yes, generally speaking the faster the rotational speed the faster the performance. Other things can affect performance also, such as the drive interface (how it connects, PATA, SATA, SCSI, etc) and platter density (meaning how much information can be stored per square inch of disk space).

Answer 8

Yes rpm of your hard drive is part of the computers overall performance and if it is too slow for your programs it will not work properly.

Answer 9

Yes. Think of a hard drive like a an old record player.

If you have it on 33rpm, it will play the song in 3 minutes.

If you have it on 45rpm, it will play the song in 2 minutes.

Faster rotation speed translates into faster data transfer and access.

Answer 10

Yes, a faster spinning HDD can increase read time which in turn increases porformance. More importantly though it the transfer rate from HDD to Computer. This is related to the interface. Serial ATA is faster than IDE (for internal), and IEEE1394 (Firewire) is faster than USB (for external).