Hard Drive Speed Difference

Azza

Guys how much faster would a 7,200rpm drive be over a 5,200rpm drive. And much faster is a drive with 8mb cache to 2mb. Finally how much of an improvement in speed would you get from placing 2 7,200rpm drives on raid 0

RicardoSmith

You'd notice the difference with all those improvements. But in some tasks, you'd notice it more than others. If you want numbers you need to look at a site that benchmarks a few HD's. Somewhere like http://www.storagereview.com/ for example.

BloodBath

My second computer has a 5200rpm drive with 2mb of cache and it's really slow.

The two 7200's in RAID 0 are very fast in comparison.


BloodBath

nadir

I dont use raid or anything, but I have a 200G 7200 Maxtor ide and 36G Scsi Maxtor

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1736 MB in 2.00 seconds = 866.83 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 86 MB in 3.07 seconds = 28.04 MB/sec

/dev/sda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 764 MB in 2.00 seconds = 381.87 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 150 MB in 3.00 seconds = 49.94 MB/sec

maybe some more benchmarks might answer your question.