RPM or Gb for new hard drive

I am planning on upgrading my hard drive, so I looked and decided to get either

hitachi deskstar 60gb 7200rpm

or

seagate 100gb 5400rpm

I am leaning toward hitachi hard drive becasue of the higher rpms, so is that good choice

I would get the seagate
its a small difference in speed because the seagate has the data more densely packed however the hitachi does write a bit faster. power consumption is also about the same and the hitachi is a bit louder

I will have to google and yahoo a bit more to findout to do either 5400 or 7200 and 60gb vs 100gb so far I didn't find straight answers

I would say unless your gaming and you mind your load times being 3 seconds longer than times with a 5400, go with the larger storage!

that is the ony time i notice slowness with my 4x00rpm drive is during level loads...

Sorry to disagree... I felt a so big jump in performance when going from a 5400 to the 7K60 that I would not go back... note that it's not only the rotational speed (so lower rotational latency), but also seeks faster (10 msec vs 12 msec typical)... and data transfer rates are higher than those with 5400 RPM drives... all in all, my advice is that unless you *need* the extra space, go for the 7K60.

FTC.... the speed difference isn't noticable except during initial seek and load. an ATA 100 5400RPM drive sends data at exactly the same speed as an ATA 100 7200RPM drive.

The only reason i would go for a faster drive is that is where i put the swap file and/or OS at. (faster swap = happy compy). Otherwise, I always go for size. I find my storage needs increase about every 6 months (have to double the current space to stay 'comfortable' with storage ability).

However, if i were in his shoes, PRICE!!!! the 60Gb should be cheaper than the 100Gb... but if its really close... go with the 100Gb.... if its more economical per gig to get the larger drive, go for it.

TollhouseFrank, sorry you are not right. *All* seeks are faster with the 7K60, and not only the initial ones. In what it relates to transfer rates, as you can see in the 7K60 specs, the media transfer rate for 7K60 is of 518 Mbits/sec vs. 5K80 (the fastest 5400 RPM drive) of 450 Mbits/sec, or 386Mbits/sec for the 100Gb 5400RPM seagate. Although this is NOT sustained transfer rates, it is close and gives an idea.

But if you want more online proofs, please visit any of the published reviews about the subject, as for instance Xbit Labs Review were you will see the 7K60 leading all sorts of 5400 and 4200 drives.

EDIT. Regarding the seagate 100Gb drive, it's not even *that* fast as it can also be seen in recent Seagate xbit labs review,

just think about it and choose what suits you...
think about price vs needs vs a bit of performance...
if you need the storage go for the 100 gig but if your on a budget go for the 60 gig.
if you need performance id go get a raptor because the difference between these two drives is pretty insignificant.
oh wait i see in your sig you already have a raptor...
if i were you and i wasn't on a tight budget id get the 100 gig and put all of the "performance needing" things (games page file swap file) on the raptor and all of my other junk on the brand new 100 gig drive.
but if your concerned about the price and you think 60 is enough (it probably will be but i dont know for sure) go for it...
holy crap you already have like 434 gigs...well go for the 100 if you need it...

Slow hard drives are one of the biggest bottlenecks in laptops. Going to 7200RPM drive will be faster.

The question is: do you need the extra 40 gigs? and if so, will an external harddrive be good enough for storage for you?

Get a faster drive. Not only are you suffering in read/write access speed but in also access time. Truely what do you need on a laptop that takes more then 60gig? If theres more, your better off having a secondary drive anyways for backup purposes also.

Im all about capacity. I would rather take a 400GB HDD @ 5400RPM than a 120GB @ 10,000PRM. Thats just me

... Of course you can always wait for the Seagate Momentus 7200 / 100 GB drive to hit the streets...

FTC said:

TollhouseFrank, sorry you are not right. *All* seeks are faster with the 7K60, and not only the initial ones. In what it relates to transfer rates, as you can see in the 7K60 specs, the media transfer rate for 7K60 is of 518 Mbits/sec vs. 5K80 (the fastest 5400 RPM drive) of 450 Mbits/sec, or 386Mbits/sec for the 100Gb 5400RPM seagate. Although this is NOT sustained transfer rates, it is close and gives an idea.

But if you want more online proofs, please visit any of the published reviews about the subject, as for instance Xbit Labs Review were you will see the 7K60 leading all sorts of 5400 and 4200 drives.

EDIT. Regarding the seagate 100Gb drive, it's not even *that* fast as it can also be seen in recent Seagate xbit labs review,

Click to expand...

so for the slowest drive (the 100gb) it's still got a speed of 48.25MB/s .... heh like I stated above the only time you will notice a significant performance hit is when transferring files or loading a huge game level or video editing... everyday use is fine unless your an avid gamer... a 45MB file dosen't come around very often... usually 10k for a word processor here and 4megs for an mp3 there... the 7200 drive has a peak of 64.75MB/s so in theory it's 16MB/s faster but to gain an entire second worth of time you gotta takle a 200meg file or larger...


I would say keeping your drive Defragged and killing your pagefile will make a larger performance difference than a drive upgrade... Have you ever tried to play HL2 on a laptop with only 512megs of ram? you have to load about 300 megs to ram and then another 1GB to virtual memmory which absolutelly kills the loading times... and this could be avoided by not a faster drive but about 2gigs more memmory...


for a desktop computer I would say go for the 7200 drive hands down but for a laptop i would not say so... the last time I looked the 60GB 7200 RPM drive was going for $1.5x the 100GB 5400 drive which to me ain't worth it...

The 7200 will certianly be faster (both in transfer rate and latency), so if that's what you want, I'd get it. If storage space is more valuable to you than the speed though, 5400 is probably liveable (like ozzlo said, it will probably show up the most when loading huge files like levels, or when loading lots of files period). One other thing to consider is that the 7200 will likely eat up more power than the 5400 as well, reducing your battery life a bit. I can't say how much, but it should be noted.

JigPu