HDD performance

quarryman

Would I notice much a difference between these 2 drives? I'll mainly be using it for storage, music, photos etc.

cookie1977

I'd choose the 7200rpm drive personally. Depending on the rest of the spec of your pc you should notice an improvement in speed using this drive over the 5900rpm

xsiborg

as Cookie said, go with the higher 7200RPM drive, i recently after a mishap with my laptop (my son tripped over the adapter which pulled the laptop off the table) had to replace the 320GB 7200 drive, so i had a spare 500GB 5400 drive handy that i had in a caddy using it for storage, so i put that in the laptop, and i definitely noticed the difference in boot up time, general usage, starting up programs, so much so that i decided to buy a 7200 drive for both my laptop and netbook (to replace the 120GB 5400 drive that was in there!)...

quarryman

great thanks guys. good to have some real world experience. Although this would just be a storage drive rather than the Windows disk, it would be a pity to hamstring for some later use.

Voodu Child

For a storage drive speed is not particularly important, the Seagate 5900rpm is actually a pretty fast drive anyway.

I wouldn't worry about future use because you're hardly going to take an old storage drive and use it as your OS drive in a few years. Usually its the other way around.

cookie1977

I would say it does especially if you're copying very large files. I prefer fast drives

marco_polo

cookie1977 wrote: »

I would say it does especially if you're copying very large files. I prefer fast drives

You'd be surprised, it doesn't make a massive amount of difference you could hardly call modern 5400/5900 drives slouches by probably only 10-15% slower for copying (read/write) file. Unless you are doing an awful lot transferring files around it doesn't matter much.

http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/797/

Having said all that I would get the Samsung F3 1TB, it is better and nearly a tenner cheaper than the barracuda 7200.12.

http://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=GCE11706

cookie1977

10-15% slower? Thats the difference between happy me and frustrated me

Voodu Child

marco_polo wrote: »

You'd be surprised, it doesn't make a huge amount of difference you could hardly call modern 5400/5900 drives slouches probably only 10-15% slower for copying (read/write) file.

http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/797/

And it'll only 'slow you down' if you are copying to/from a faster drive.

cookie1977

Voodu Child wrote: »

And it'll only 'slow you down' if you are copying to/from a faster drive.

Thats why I said depending on the rest of your spec

marco_polo

cookie1977 wrote: »

10-15% slower? Thats the difference between happy me and frustrated me

Depends what you need I guess, I have a 5400 2TB where movies / music get downloaded to and never touched again except to be read by VLC.

The only file transfers that ever take place is a back up to an external 2TB, and over a USB 2 connection a internal drive 5400 rpm isn't going to be the bottleneck there .

If you are constantly moving large file between drives then that is a different matter of course.