Hard Drive RPMs

uberinstalleruberinstaller
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
In terms of real performance, how much difference will one see between a 5400 vs a 7200 vs a 10,000 rpm drive? Also, how does this mesh with ATA/100 vs ATA/66 vs Firewire and SCSI? I am about to get this dual 1Ghz machine and thinking about adding a 120GB HD.



Anyone have any insight about what will produce the best performance for the price?



<img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    applenutapplenut Posts: 5,768member
    7200RPM ATA Hard drives are the sweet point right now. very affordable and the performance is great.



    the difference from 5400 to 7200 is veyr noticeable. there are no 10000 RPM ATA hard drives only SCSI. And they cost a hell of a lot of money. Depending on what you're doing its likely overkill.



    120GB 7200 RPM ATA drive is perfect
  • Reply 2 of 8
    g-newsg-news Posts: 1,107member
    or you could go for a big 15K rpm SCSI drive and end up pying more for he harddrive than the whole system



    G-news
  • Reply 3 of 8
    agent302agent302 Posts: 974member
    Well, for comparison, a while back, I replaced the 5400 rpm drive in my old iMac with a 7200 rpm drive, and it started up from a cold boot significantly faster.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    futuremacfuturemac Posts: 242member
    video looks a heck of a lot better on a 7200 hd. i upgraded from a 5400 and the diffrence was very noticable, so much so that i now suggest only 7200 and up to newbies buying thir 1st computer.



    i can now see every hair on britneys ...er..head



    load up on the ram too, cant have too much ram or hd space (and yes ddr is way better than sdr)



    [ 08-31-2002: Message edited by: futuremac ]</p>
  • Reply 5 of 8
    neutrino23neutrino23 Posts: 1,562member
    Faster RPMs should result in faster data transfer rates but it is not guaranteed. Areal density, on board electronics and quality of the driver also have an effect. If you look at some of the sites that test these things you often find that drives with similar specs on paper will have very different real world performance.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    isracesisraces Posts: 92member
    be conscious of the cache as well, if you're going for a 120 GB 7200 drive, go get the WD Caviar drive with the 8MB cache. I picked one up today at CompUSA for about $140 with the rebates. You can probably do even better on-line.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    matsumatsu Posts: 6,558member
    I've always wondered why hard-drive speeds tend to come in a few limited rpm flavors. We have 4200 (notebook), 5400, 7200, 10000, and 15000. Why wouldn't manufacturers rotational speeds be all over the board? 6300, or 7500, or 9000 or whatever depending on the drive and required speed/noise/power characteristics? Do they all just buy bearings from the same vendor?
  • Reply 8 of 8
    rhoqrhoq Posts: 190member
    Last week I replaced by 5400 RPM 6GB factory HD on my iMac with a Western Digital 7200 RPM 100GB.



    2 days before I changed HDs I upgraded to OS-X (10.1.5)...



    Here are the performance differences I have noticed since changing to a larger and faster HD.



    MacOS 9.2.2 - I have never (and I mean never) seen it run this fast. Usually, from a cold boot - it would take just under a minute to start-up. With the new drive, my computer starts up from a cold boot in 30 seconds!



    MacOS-X (10.1.5) - I have noticed very minimal differences. I know that OS-X runs slow on my machine (iMac 350) - but I feel that it is worth having just to be in a freeze-free enviornment. I have not really noticed much of a difference in OS-X's performance with the fast drive speed.
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