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Question on HDD characteristics

K

Kuo

Gawd
Joined
Jun 7, 2001
Messages
641
I was curious about something, but am having trouble wrapping my head around it. How does the # of disks in a HDD impact the overall speed/performance?

Specifically, my friend has two drives he no longer needs and is willing to gift me one of them. He's asked me which I want...
7200 RPM, 5-Disk 4TB Drive
5400 RPM, 4-Disk 4TB Drive.

In the past, I've always understood 7200 RPM > 5400 RPM, and would have defaulted to the 7200 RPM.

However, I recently ran some speed tests on my some other drives I had.. a 5 yr old WD 1 TB Black 7200 RPM vs a 3 yr old WD 2 TB 5400 RPM Enterprise Edition drive, and the 5400 RPM was extremely close in performance to the WD Black. It COULD have been because of the age of the drive, but it made me think, "Oh hey, RPM isn't the whole story anymore."

I know there's many characteristics of a drive, but if I was to only look at RPM & "Areal Density," what impacts what, and by how much. Ultimately, which of the two drives should I pick.
 
They are similar in sequential performance because of the density issue that you noticed. ie - reading one large single file.

But faster speed drive (7200) will always have the edge over the slower drive when it comes to servicing many requests due to the decreased latency.

In summary:
Home use - it doesn't really matter, choose the cheaper of the two.

Heavy use scenario - choose the higher RPM.
 
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