2TB hdd with 5900 rpm speeds

[miko999]

I have noticed that alot of the 2tb harddrives are offered at a much lower rpm speed the cheap ones are anyway.Will this lower rpm speed hamper performance much orwould on estill get decent runnin, reading and writing speeds with these drives doesnt seem to make much sense to me to make a drive at a slower rate. Can anyone elaborate?

Are they worth it for the slower rpm?

 

[nukemaster]

2tb drives have very high density platters so the speed is still fairly fast even at 5900rmps, but the access times are slower. Access times are important for accessing fragmented files of multiple files from different locations on the disc.

If the drive is for storage, 5900rpms should be ok. For games, generally the improvements(but this will depend on game and app as well) had from getting a 7200rpm drive are worth it.

 

[miko999]

it would be used for storage and games yes, would this create noticeable lag within games when played from 5900 drive?

 

[Leaps-from-Shadows]

The reason they make larger hard drives with lower RPM is for people who are concerned with how "green" their PC is. They are usually marketed as a low-power alternative, because they consume less power rotating at a slower speed.

The slowest part of a computer is the hard drive. Making that slow part even slower will literally slow down every facet of using the computer. Using the internet will be slower, gaming will be slower, video editing will be slower, using MS Office will be slower, etc. Any time the disk is accessed, performance will be slower.

For the average computer user who doesn't know any better, they probably wouldn't notice any difference. Those who have had 7200RPM drives for a while and are used to that level of performance, the slower drive would be immediately apparent.

If the drive is used for infrequent storage or backup, then it would be okay. For everyday usage, I wouldn't recommend it. I would actually sacrifice capacity for greater RPMs -- go with a 1TB 7200RPM drive instead of a 2TB 5900RPM drive if you must. You can always add more capacity later.

 

[miko999]

hmmm interesting thanks for the heads up really don't want multiple 1tb's to be honest but i see not other choice so 1tb's it is. People making the 5900rpm drives left me scratching my head i was like why the f would anyone want a slower hdd, ridiculous.

 

[nukemaster]

If you want speed and capacity, WDC Black 2tb drives are 7200rpm drives.

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=58376&vpn=WD2002FAEX&manufacture=Western%20Digital%20WD

I am gonna have to say that the internet does NOT run slower on a 5900rpm drive(your internet connection is the limit for loading pages and such, most work is done in ram).
Games load slower, but once loaded are the same since most games run from ram.

I am not saying you will not see the difference on a 5900-7200rpm drive, i am saying that it will not be life and death.

As said, the 5900rpm drives are GREAT for storage.

Ohhh and do you know this years 5900rpm drives are faster then a 7200 rpm drive from just 2 years ago in raw read speed(access times are a few ms slower, this will suck as the drive gets fragmented, but as a file drive its not an issue). Guess what you use for video editing? game loading ect? read speeds.

Best bet if speed concerns are an issue is the WD Black or a fast SSD and secondary large capacity hard drive.

It is true that the hard drive is the slowest link in any computer, but it depends on the use how much it effects you. It is like people claiming higher frame rates with SSD's, just wishful thinking.

 

[miko999]

your inputs appreciated thanks.

 

[miko999]

will be used for games, storage and unpacking large rar archives. Why is it, that even though i have an i5 quad core the computer just slows down to a snails pace when extracting rars its stupid.

I had a few wd hdd fail on me a couple of years ago so will be going with a seagate still not sure which yet though, will have to think on it.

 

[nukemaster]

Rar archives are compressed, they need lots of cpu power to compress and decompress.

As you can see, this is one time where the cpu can not keep up with the hard drives. So RAR extraction is slow(with large files). There is also an effect to decompressing on the same drive(the drive heads have to read, move write over and over again, low access times are good for this), extraction from one drive to another should eliminate this bottleneck.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-2010/Archiving-WinRAR-3.92-x64,2430.html

In general games should be on your fastest drive. Files can go on the slower drives.

It is also important to know, while decompressing a RAR file on the same drive as windows, your drive is already working hard and will load apps slower since it has to jump from extracting to opening files and back again.

2 hard drives is optimal to be honest. Windows and apps and one for files

Just a compare, more for the 7200 vs 5900, the 7200 gets 13.7 to 14ms access times vs 14.8 for the 5900, so when the drive has to access more then one file at the same time, it can slow down, but for storage, it should be fine.

Seagate 1000gig 7200rpm

Seagate 2000gig 5900rpm

There is no right and wrong answer here. It is all about your system use.

 

[miko999]

Aye that does make sense.

Again cheers, will be getting a 7200 as its going to be used for everything. I have a system drive as well but install games on the storage drive exactly like your own setup, it also simplifies restoring from an image on Acronis i.e. not having to copy over a huge amount of games in order to restore.

 

[fzabkar]

Slower drives run at a lower temperature, so they are better suited to external enclosures. If the external interface is USB, then the transfer rate will be bottlenecked by the USB-SATA bridge board, not the drive. For example, a typical transfer rate for USB 2.0 is 20 MB/s.