Is there a tremendous, noticeable difference between a 5400 rpm HDD and a 7200 rpm HDD? Or is it just hype ?

Question

I just bought a brand new HDD that has 160 GB of space and has 5400 rpms; i got it for a grand total of $35.00 (shipping included). I had to upgrade because my current hard drive is already maxing at 60 GB.

Now I understand there's a speed difference between 5400 rpm and 7200 rpms. And that the faster the platters (aka hard discs) spin, the faster the files can be retrieved and used. From that, two questions:

1. I only intensive thing I perform on my PC is DVD-R and CD-R burning. Is there going to be major, noticeable difference between a buringing a DVD-R/CD-R on a 5400 disc in contrast to a 7200 disc???

2. Right now, with my current drive I always burn my discs at half the top speed allowed by the disc. So if a CD-R goes up to 52x, I'll be using 24x to burn at. Likewise, a DVD-R top speed is 16x but I always use 8x. I find it's far more reliable. Will my 5400 rpm HDD affect this procedure?

3. Is the speed difference of RPM HDDs just hype? Is there a huge time gap?

Extra info. I have no interest in databases or modern PC video games either. I understand those two activities benefit from having a much faster RPM HDD.

My system is a Pentium 4
2.0MHz with 1 GB of RAM
with a Lighscribe DVD RW drive

Answer 1

to be honest. for our application, the 54k will be fine. Since you only write at 24x/8x (smart move, it is much more reliable, for me at least) you don't need to access the data all that quickly.

if you were doing video editing, music, etc then you'd want to have a 72k or even a 10k setup, but i think you'll do nicely with the system you have.

the speed issue isn't just hype, but like i said above, it depends on the use of the drive.

Answer 2

according to what you said you will benefit much more form having more space, and thats a prety good price i think. because i do not believe the burning speed of either of the 2 things you mentioned abov can outerform the retrieval speed of the 5400 hardrive. i think you made a good choice, as gaming and movng and sharing files are the only real things that you will notice a difference in.

Answer 3

Your HDD rotational speed will have no effect on your burn times, and little effect on most applications, including games, because Windows (and I assume you are using Windows) minimizes disk usage. As one other respondent suggested, it's more important to stuff it with memory.

However, if you were running Linux/Unix, it would be noticeable since that OS keeps a lot of files open and does a lot more disk I/O.

Answer 4

For your application, the RPM difference does not really matter much. It matters more in applications that open huge files often like in PC games. It is not hype. It's been fully tested in games. That's why hard core gamers use the 10,000rpm WD Raptor.

Answer 5

Tremendous no, Noticeable maybe in some larger application load times. The more noticeable spec would be rather your using SATA or IDE. Overall the only increase in performance you would see is Load TImes.

Good luck

Answer 6

7200 rpm will read/write data faster, but will also get hotter. If the 5400 is cheaper or comes with more storage than the 7200, I would go for it.

Answer 7

The average rotational latency for a
5400 RPM drive is 5.56 milliseconds (ms) and 4.17 ms for a 7200 RPM drive.

How important is a millisecond to you ?

You can read about it yourself here -

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/2579-001043.pdf

Answer 8

Hi. No. If the drive meets your needs then it is OK. RAM is much more important. Max it out if you can.