5400 vs 7200 rpm for streaming video.

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Zefram0911

[H]ard|Gawd
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Been a long time since I've bought a regular hard drive, but my 2TB drive is starting to click and I think is dying.

Does rotational speed matter much if I'm using the drive as a media drive to watch 1080p videos?

Thanks in advance for the thoughts.
 
Does rotational speed matter much if I'm using the drive as a media drive to watch 1080p videos?
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No. You will not have an issue unless you are recording multiple streams at while trying to watch a stream or two.
 
Thanks guys. yeah, that's exactly why I was asking. Looking to buy a new drive and wondered if the speeds actually mattered, especially if I was using it to stream videos to another pc. It's a Western Digital drive that lasted me 6 years. seems like a reasonable amount of time to die.
 
drescherjm said:
I think that means if you want performance get a SSD instead.
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Why? For storing and streaming videos, HDD spinners work perfectly fine. Movies take up a huge amount of space and who wants to buy a 2, 3, 4 GB ssd?

I would like to have pictures in an ssd since the slower access time of HDDs can slow things down when looking through many very high definition pictures quickly.

Back on topic. My internal 5400 rpm is tread fully slow and it was from a dead laptop. In fact, read/write access to my external 7200 rpm mycloud is faster. Get a 7200 rpm if you have the room.
 
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The point was if you need speed the 7200 vs 5400 is irrelevant when we have SSDs. With that said I don't 100% support that argument. At work all of the hard drives I purchase are 7200 RPM. Although the bulk of these go into raid servers where I absolutely won't use a 5400 RPM drive unless it is for a backup only role.
At home I do purchase 5400 RPM drives for my linux based PVR (8TB WDC externals to be exact). I am not using raid and the 5400 vs 7200 is not at all needed for even multiple simultaneous recordings and watching of HD video.
 
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I couldn't stream 4K movies thru my Oppo 203 without them freezing every 30 seconds or so, without first moving the video file from the spinner(s) to the main OS SSD drive. 1080P worked fine.
 
if you are doing 1 or 2 streams, like kids watching upstairs, and you are watching down stairs, a 5400 drive should be fine. If you are hosting multiple streams, a 7200 would be best. Could up the crazy, and raid a few 5400s together. Long sequential reads (watching movies) is not hard to do. Not sure if they are still around, but a hybrid sshd could also be an option. I have 1 in my "media" machine, and it holds up well recording at 24bit 96k audio, and playing it back.
 
drescherjm said:
The point was if you need speed the 7200 vs 5400 is irrelevant when we have SSDs.
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I still don't get this argument. Thay is like saying the speed of a truck is irrelevant because we have sports cars. Some people still want fast trucks!

coynatha said:
I couldn't stream 4K movies thru my Oppo 203 without them freezing every 30 seconds or so, without first moving the video file from the spinner(s) to the main OS SSD drive. 1080P worked fine.
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Resolution is not really relevant, but bit rate is. The crappy "1080p" movies that my wife downloads are only 1000 kb/s. Most look pretty bad. When I rip standard def DVDs, I set it to 2000 kb/s. When I start ripping BLU-rays, they will most likely be around 5000 kb/s so they can fit on a DVD-9 if need be later. From what I gather, picture quality should be very close to BLUray. Still, 100 movies will use up a 1 TB hdd. Not many will be storing 4k movies for a while. That is part of the reason I got a One X!
 
Nightfire said:
Why? For storing and streaming videos, HDD spinners work perfectly fine. Movies take up a huge amount of space and who wants to buy a 2, 3, 4 GB ssd?

I would like to have pictures in an ssd since the slower access time of HDDs can slow things down when looking through many very high definition pictures quickly.

Back on topic. My internal 5400 rpm is tread fully slow and it was from a dead laptop. In fact, read/write access to my external 7200 rpm mycloud is faster. Get a 7200 rpm if you have the room.
Click to expand...

Laptop drives are pretty much always horrifically slow.
 
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