7200rpm vs. 5400rpm

onetrueday · Post by **onetrueday** » Thu Jul 05, 2001 4:45 am

Howdy everyone! First of all, thanks for reading this. I hope your day(or night) is going well and that great health has been placed upon your family.

I presently have a maxtor 15gig ata100 7200rpm for my master Hd and a seagate 8gig ata33 5400rpm as a slave. The maxtor is partitioned in 6(which is my os and programs) and 8(backups, unzipped, songs, and games). The 8 gig is only used for hotline downloads. I've been considering for some time getting a nother hard drive. A local store has a 30gig maxtor 5400rpm on sale after rebate for $60. This would be perfect for what I want it for, which is to hold more mp3's games and downloads.

I'm not concerned with benchmarks. I'm only curious what is the real speed difference between 7200rpm and 5400rpm? Is it simular to a duron and thunderbird, where it is minimal in real time applications?

Thanks for any expert help in this matter and ciao!

Brent · Post by **Brent** » Thu Jul 05, 2001 4:53 am

There is a noticeable difference between 5400 and 7200rpm hard drives, especially for todays multimedia rich applications and programs etc....

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Thu Jul 05, 2001 6:27 am

There is quite a noticable performance.

Another nice gain you'll notice is if you yank that old ATA-33 drive off of your primary IDE controller, and add it to your secondary IDE controller where your cd-rom is. The IDE controller has to default to the slowest attached drive, (a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link), so it never lets your ATA-100 drive get out of second gear if it has that old 33 slaved onto it.

onetrueday · Post by **onetrueday** » Thu Jul 05, 2001 6:44 am

Thanks brent! I'll have to reconsider what I want the drive for before I buy then. Stonecat, there is always a chance I am mistaken; but I believe you are incorrect. I have my channels set up like this.

ide1
master maxtor ata100
slave seagate ata33

ide2
master burner pio4(or maybe it's a differant number)
slave cdrom ata33

Yep, that's it. I have run the computer with the maxtor all by it's self and ran some benchmarks, just because I ws curious. There was NO speed difference with or without the seagate. My conclusion is that modern day motherboards are able to deal with each on independantly. Please correct me if i'm wrong, because the computer also didnt seem any faster with the seagate either.

Jim · Post by **Jim** » Thu Jul 05, 2001 6:57 am

There is a nice difference, but I still say it depends on what you do with it.

If you just browse around the internet, use Word, and play a few MP3's, 5400 works just fine.

If you more than that, I'd recommend a 7200.

Brent · Post by **Brent** » Thu Jul 05, 2001 2:47 pm

ide1
master maxtor ata100
slave seagate ata33

ide2
master burner pio4(or maybe it's a differant number)
slave cdrom ata33

[/B]

Your hurting yourself

Your IDE 1 channel is defaulting to ATA/33 because each channel only goes as fast as your Slowest Hard Drive. So both your Maxtor and your Seagate are running at ATA/33 :\

Same for IDE 2 it's goin at PIO mode 4

A_old · Post by **A_old** » Thu Jul 05, 2001 5:37 pm

Two things affect harddrive performance...

First: RPM, or rotations per minute which basically give the drive it's MAXIMUM throughput rate.. meaning a 10,000 RPM scsi drive will be able to burst and hit higher than a 7,200 RPM...same with IDE..

Second: Platter Density...the more dense the platter, the less the heads in the drive have to move to read data. This increases the MINIMUM speed in MB/s that the harddrive will send data to the computer at.

Keep in mind that the fastest drives have a hard time sustaining 25 MB/s accross the entire platter. What does this mean???? A new 5,400 RPM drive could VERY and I do mean VERY possibly be faster than a 7,200 RPM drive from a year or two ago. Basically if you're buying new, get the 7,200..if it's a main drive.. for basic data storage... 5,400 RPM drives are fine.....Kewl? I have 1 30 GIG 7,200 RPM drive for my main drive, and 3 30 GIG 5,400 RPM drives for storage. Later.

onetrueday · Post by **onetrueday** » Thu Jul 05, 2001 7:12 pm

Thanks for such a detailed explaination!

terrancelam · Post by **terrancelam** » Thu Jul 05, 2001 9:52 pm

BTW the , the price difference at the moment between the 5400's and 7200's is about $38(CAD) at most. But do alittle background check on the specifics of the hard drives before you buy. some of them have dirty tendencies, like not performing as well or breaking very easily.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Fri Jul 06, 2001 12:17 am

It's absolutely true that your channel will default to the slowest of the two speeds on it. It does not split up. If you have a master ATA-100 and a slave ata-33, your IDE bus will run at ata-33.

Also true that you have to have a fast ata-100 drive to feel the cripple of running at ata-33, as most ata-100 drives will not pass 35 Mb/s of sustained transfer, most are in the upper 20's/lower 30's.

It's not the hard drive that can transfer at 100 Mb/s on an ATA-100, it's the bus that can handle UP TO that for short bursts.

Your test of running each drive by itself actually didn't prove a thing. As either of your drives are not capable of even approaching the ATA-33 capacity.

Where you would feel the effect the most is if you tried a RAID 0 striped array, with an ATA-33 in the mix. I love my RAID array...talk about throughput!

onetrueday · Post by **onetrueday** » Fri Jul 06, 2001 1:40 am

I still think you're wrong about not mixing ata's on the same channel. I've run benchmarks on both hard drives before and the maxtor ata100 preformed much better then the seagate ata33. It's been awhile since I have benchmarked them, so my numbers might be a little off. However, the maxtor was running mid 50's or low sixty's I think. I'll rerun them and post them up here when I get home. (what's that one benchmark called... hd tach?)

I only asked because a local paper had a maxtor 5400rpm 30gig for 60 after rebates. However, I was mistaken. It was a 15gig for 60, which I dont think it that good of a deal.

A_old · Post by **A_old** » Fri Jul 06, 2001 6:04 am

yea i really don't know about the whole mixing different ata drives thing. mmm. seeing as how it doesn't matter over ata66 i don't care tho.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Fri Jul 06, 2001 6:48 am

I didn't say your 7200 rpm drive wasn't faster than your 5400 rpm drive.

smaier69 · Post by **smaier69** » Fri Jul 06, 2001 7:06 am

well, just to add something about the mixing ATA/speed devices..... usually the only way you will see a difference is in the burst (cached) speeds. most of the newer/faster drives will top out around a sustained throughput of 34MBps to 40MBps (i know Seagate is touting their new bearing/motor/platter density which makes their drives sustain in excess of 60MBps, but i am talking about drives that are on the market and currently have consumers with the drives in their machines), which is not that much above (if even the case) the 33MBps, so the majority of throughput numbers will not show any loss of performance.

i'm not excluding some sort of hot connect/disconnect (its what it sounds like) feature implementation that may be new in IDE controllers/devices (i have only seen it in SCSI, USB, and IEEE 1394 as of yet), but thats what would be required. even if there were hot connect/disconnect, if both the devices (on the same channel) were reading/writing/moving data, it would still default to the slowest device in the chain.

i also run a striped IDE RAID array (2 IBM 60GXPs), and would immediately see the shortage if not running ATA/100 at the controller (74MBps sustained would be a noticable performance loss if it were to run at ATA/33).

i would definitely like to see some different SiSoft and/or HDTach results for your config with the devices you mentioned. i know it would be a pain, and if i were you i probably wouldn't bother, but i know i would not be the only one who may benefit. i have been wrong before and wouldnt doubt for a second that my knowledge could be wrong/out-dated.

onetrueday · Post by **onetrueday** » Fri Jul 06, 2001 5:53 pm

:

outing:: I feel as if I've lost my religon.

After years of believe that you could mix ata devices on a cable, I have been proven wrong! I did a hdtach benchmark on both of my hard drives and my faith has been shattered! My maxtor was able to sustain 31meg/s and my seagate was able to sustain around 9megs/s. So, buying a new second hard drive would give me a HUGE increase in preformance. Thanks for taking me back to the straight and narrow.

A_old · Post by **A_old** » Sat Jul 07, 2001 1:04 am

bull to any hdd sustaining freaking 60 megs/sec...they physically can't unless it's IN the 2 meg cache from byte 1 to byte 2 :P for like 1 millionth of a second heh..not even damn 10k and 15k ultra 160 scsi drives sustain that. heh they top out at MAYBE 40 sustained...average closer to 25-30 accross the drive

onetrueday · Post by **onetrueday** » Sat Jul 07, 2001 2:34 am

I figured out why I thought my maxtor was running at ata100. During startup when the bios reports back with speeds, it shows my maxtor as being seen as an ata100. i assumed it meant that it was running that fast. Guess, I was wrong.

I do another question though. My burner is actually running at pio4, while my cdrom is running at ata33. What is my cdrom actually running at then? pio4?

smaier69 · Post by **smaier69** » Sat Jul 07, 2001 6:22 am

bull to any hdd sustaining freaking 60 megs/sec...they physically can't unless it's IN the 2 meg cache from byte 1 to byte 2 :P for like 1 millionth of a second heh..not even damn 10k and 15k ultra 160 scsi drives sustain that. heh they top out at MAYBE 40 sustained...average closer to 25-30 accross the drive

i know, they are not on the market right now, thats why i said what i did (talking about drives on the market right now), but i am still talking sustained and not cached.... i cant seem to find the same article i read which stated the projected sustained throughput numbers. the article at the seagate site only quotes internal (i know, its a different ballgame) transfer speeds of 69MBps. nontheless, the technology is on the market's doorstep.

and as far as the SCSI thing... the Quantum Atlas 10K-II has a peak of 44MBps sustained reads. 158MBps (cached) in 64bit mode and 79MBps in 32bit. i have personally sat in front of a mchine with this config and run some tests myself, but if you would like to see some different scores, see http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content ... e/1265.10/ . heck, even one of the IBM 60GXPs in my main machine can sustain 40MBps.... or 74MBps in RAID 0 (which both are running in).

anyways, the new technology just down the pike is pretty exciting compared to what we have available to us today. i am personally waiting for Serial ATA....... mmmmmmm (*drooling*)..... seeeeeriaaaal aaaay-teeee-aaaaay.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Sat Jul 07, 2001 7:55 am

Totally nods with smaier69.....similar setup here, pair of Barracuda III drives in a RAID 0 striped setup.

Drooling for the new Barracuda 4 drives.

I'm historically a fan of the IBM Deskstar drives, but I came across this pair of Barracuda III ATA-100 7200 rpm 2 meg caches drives for a great price (free), so I picked up a PCI ATA-100 RAID controller. Man it's nice.