7200 or 5400 on SATA ???

t0ny · 19 Jun 2006 at 09:43

Hi there,

I have recently been told that a 5400 is as good as a 7200 when run on SATA (this is in a laptop). This does not make sense to me because surely the 7200 drive is spinning faster improving seek time??

Could someone just clarify this for me?

Thanks in advance

Messiah Khan · 19 Jun 2006 at 09:47

No, 5400rpm is not as good as 7200rpm. The fact that it is on SATA makes very little noticeable difference to IDE in real performance terms. Quite a few laptops use 5400rpm drives to keep down noise and power consumption, but in terms of performance, 7200rpm will win.

smids · 19 Jun 2006 at 10:56

Hitachi laptop drives are excellent for power anyway. Look out for the Hitachi 7K100 60GB drive which is an excellent performer and doesn't consume much more than the 5400rpm drive. The 7K60 60GB uses a fair bit more.

With regards to your question, the interface, unless in RAID with make no difference at all, the spindle speed will make a large difference.

MAllen · 20 Jun 2006 at 13:49

I have a 7200rpm drive in my lappy, and the speed difference is noticable. Especially when doing file intenstive work like installing software from CD.

Gamefreak501 · 22 Jun 2006 at 08:59

I can say from experience that a 5,400RPM drive is noticeably slower than a 7,200RPM Hard Drive.

SATA drives perform about the same as IDE drives, but don't have that stupid big ribbon cable on them.

SATA II drives perform better than any of the above, although you'll need a controller that is SATA II compatible to get that performance.