3.5" 5400 RPM hard drives still being sold!

[trents]

I see in the New Egg adds lately deals on 3.5" 5400 rpm consumer class new hard drives. Who would buy a 5400 rpm hard drive when the 7200 rpm versions are almost the same price? Makes no sense to me that these hard drive companies continue to manufacture those slower drives when in the desktop hard drive sector we have had 7200 rpm drives for many years now.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

They're still made because people still buy them.

 

[mackerel]

Is there much difference in stated power consumption? Many of the claimed power efficient drives had slower spindle speeds but I don't know if that is still the case.

 

[Johan45]

They're still made because people still buy them.

Just did a quick search by popularity on newegg and 3 out of the top 8 drives were 5400 RPM

 

[EarthDog]

Price > all.

I am not at all surprised, really. They are clearly on the slower end of things, but, still work for the majority. 99.9% of users are not like us here.

 

[(G{in}[AK)TION]]

I have seen the same myself with drives that spin at 5400rpm. I believe I read somewhere that the reason why they spin at this speed is to reduce the risk of failure.

I mean I own a 8TB WD Red drive and it spins at 5400rpm. I also have desktop extension drives that spin at 5400rpm. The hard drives that dish Network sells to their customers for archiving their recordings also spin at 5400rpm.

 

[UltraTaco]

The reason behind their popularity, and heightened reliability is perhaps due to slower speed. Data doesn't need to be applied with as much magnetic force and hold its place on the platter vs 7,2k or 10k raptors.

 

[EarthDog]

I'd like to see some data on this theory... Can't say I have heard they would be any more reliable, but that doesn't not mean they are either.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

By all technicalities if you had two identical bearings the one spinning slower would last longer.

 

[HankB]

WD 3.5" 2TB 5400 rpm drive (Blue - WD20EZRZ) power requirements: read/write: 4.1W idle: 0.4W sustained throughput 147 MB/s
WD 3.5" 2TB 7200 rpm drive (Black - WD2003FZEX) power requirements: read/write: 9.5W idle: 1.3W sustained throughput 164 MB/s

Marginal boost in speed and over twice the power requirement. Anyone going for speed is going to use an SSD. HDDs are more likely to be used for backups and archival storage or where capacity is more important than speed. With that thought in mind, I'd have to wonder why 7200 RPM drives are still made.

 

[don256us]

I have bought them for years. Yeah, the cost is lower and yeah so is the performance but, less heat generation in an already glowing red steel case. I store temporary backups of client data in case they come back to me within a few months. I store old data that I should probably have deleted years ago, like when am I going to need an installer for AVG free from 2011? The slow speed means reduced heat, reduced power and a greater potential life span.

I have never used a WD Green for OS. For my boot drive I have used WD Blue (Maxtor in the day.), raptors and now SSDs. For me, the 5400 rpm's saving grace has solely been heat.

 

[ihrsetrdr]

I actually still have a couple Raptors in-service. But recent purchases for OS drives have been SSDs. My last storage drive purchase was a WD Purple 1TB Surveillance Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM I know I know, 1TB is a joke to some, but that is still twice the amount of files that have, personally.

 

[UltraTaco]

I think we are wasting data at unprecedented levels. We need to strip down everything unnecey and only keep mission critical files.(important stuff)

 

[trents]

WD 3.5" 2TB 5400 rpm drive (Blue - WD20EZRZ) power requirements: read/write: 4.1W idle: 0.4W sustained throughput 147 MB/s
WD 3.5" 2TB 7200 rpm drive (Black - WD2003FZEX) power requirements: read/write: 9.5W idle: 1.3W sustained throughput 164 MB/s

Marginal boost in speed and over twice the power requirement. Anyone going for speed is going to use an SSD. HDDs are more likely to be used for backups and archival storage or where capacity is more important than speed. With that thought in mind, I'd have to wonder why 7200 RPM drives are still made.

That amounts to very, very small amounts of extra heat and power consumption in a desktop machine. That's a little hard to swallow for a reason to buy a 5400 rpm drive IMO. And the price differential is very minor. Not sure I see that as a good reason. Greater longevity? Eh, maybe.

 

[EarthDog]

60% difference...5.4W. That can make a difference in a laptop or smaller form factor device which uses less power. SSD is clearly the answer there, but price GB..

That said, surely sooner tha nbn later these will fade...

 

[Woomack]

There is a difference in more things if you compare 5400/auto series and 7200. 7200 usually have more cache, it uses more power. Another thing is that you can feel that faster series weight more, there simply has to be something more inside. I won't compare series but data density and other things affect that too.
Many new HDD series are marked as 5400 in stores but can have auto speed, depends on load and some other things. This is why some brands are no longer saying how fast it spins. It's the case with some WD drives because of all these power saving technologies like in WD Green.
New 5400rpm drives are not so slow comparing to older series. They beat pretty much all drives at 7200 from previous generations. A couple of years ago Raptors were popular and supposed to offer top performance. Now most new 5400 are as fast and some are faster. There are series reaching 170MB/s with respectable random performance.

Nowadays HDD are mostly used to store larger amount of data, backups etc. We can look at that as next step as HDD replaced tape drives. Even 1TB has a point. I'm sometimes selling NAS with 2-4x 1-2TB drives as clients don't need more for database backup in smaller companies.
We have a different point of view but there are still a lot of users who can live with a typical HDD speed. For us (overclockers/enthusiasts) it shouldn't even matter what speed is HDD. All HDD deliver low performance and that's why we buy SSD.

 

[Kenrou]

I have one of each on my 8370 rig - SSD for system, Raptor 10k 64mb cache for games, WDBlue 7200 64mb cache for torrents and a WDGreen 5400 16mb cache for backups. I guarantee that both the Raptor and the WDBlue are significantly faster then the WDGreen in every task (up to ~80Mb/s), especially when dealing with small files. Best way to see is how long it takes to defrag.

Difference between the Raptor and the WDBlue is much less noticeable though (up to ~30Mb/s), newer tech has it's benefits [emoji39]

 

[wagex]

for someone like me who has 11 drives in their server its a decent power savings especially since they run 24/7... that said my 5 main storage drives are 7200, they used to be 5400 but i got a better deal on 7200 when i upgraded from 1tb to 2tb drives. 5400 is still plenty to saturate a gigabit connection.
server setup:
front 2x 2.5" hot swap bays:
1x 256GB SSD for OS / Virtual machine disks.

front 3.5" hot swap bays
1x 2tb wd green for camera footage offloading for my action cameras
1x 1tb wd blue for security camera recordings
1x 300GB wd 10k velociraptor for lancache
1x 500gb seagate for virtual machine images

Internal:
5x 2tb hitachi ultrastar's in raid 5 for long term storage

external:
1x 8 TB WD usb 3.0 mybook to backup the hitachi's

I think we are wasting data at unprecedented levels. We need to strip down everything unnecey and only keep mission critical files.(important stuff)

idk about you, but mine isnt "wasted". Its only wasted if you don't use it.

 

[OC-NightHawk]

I think we are wasting data at unprecedented levels. We need to strip down everything unnecey and only keep mission critical files.(important stuff)

Most of the storage on my 3-4TB drives are movies and tv shows purchased through iTunes. My Core i7 currently is the media server.

 

[UltraTaco]

I believe in recycling and keeping our planet and computers green. Watch a movie, delete the file and recycle the freed up space!

That's also a reason why I run 3.6 GHz most of the time vs 4ghz. It's a lot less power draw. 3.24amp vs 12.28amp.

Stay green! (Or pink)