5400rpm vs 7200rpm sata 2.5" drives?

[Rolland Elliott]

I just realized that notebook 2.5" SATA drives use the same SATA connectors that desktop 3.5" sata drives do. For some reason I thought they were different (probably because ATA drives are different in this regard)

Anyways, My ideal workflow would be to shoot an event with a notebook with HD Rack, come back to the office and just pop the drive out of the notebook and into my desktop tower.

NO donwloading or transfering, I'd just work off the hard drives. I wouldn't worry about backing up stuff because I'd have my tapes for backup already.
I could just sit down and edit stuff!

So does anyone have any real world data showing that the more expensive 7200rpm notebook drives would be much better than the standard 5400rpm drives?

Thanks, Rolland

[Rolland Elliott]

http://www.barefeats.com/hard80.html

[Kevin Richard]

yeah 7200RPMs is about 33% faster than 5400RPMs so yeah.. it makes a substantial difference.

[Arnaldo Paixao]

Best regards,
Arnaldo

[David Suthers]

For standard definition data capture even 4200 rpm drives are fast enough. But actual drive throughput is affected by several factors: rpm, cache size, arial density, and the number of platters. Even the operating system on the disc will affect the capture speed. I've even seen desktop drive reviews where 7200 rpm drives were slower than 5400 rpm drives, so just saying that higher rpm's are better isn't necessarily correct.

I've been using a 60 GB, 5400 rpm drive, with a 16MB cache for SD data capture for a while now and it is plenty fast. If you are wanting to capture HD signals, then you'd probably need the biggest, fastest drive you could find.

[Peter Jefferson]

why not just get an external box and connect thru USB2 or firewire.. this way u wont have to pull ur layy apart to get teh media out... simple plug and play solutiona nd works fine for me.. ive got 3 externals through USB and i chop and change as i need.. never had an issue with USB2, but 1394 i find that windiws likes to nuke the index files

[David Suthers]

SATA is a "native" interface and will be slightly faster than USB or firewire. Basically you'd get the full speed out of the drive, with a low CPU overhead. If the laptop has trays for the drives and uses SATA connectors (and this is a big "if") then it would be the ideal solution. The convenience of external hard drives without the extra stuff to carry. Just undock the disk and pop another one in.

[Jay Stebbins]

Originally Posted by David Suthers

For standard definition data capture even 4200 rpm drives are fast enough. But actual drive throughput is affected by several factors: rpm, cache size, arial density, and the number of platters. Even the operating system on the disc will affect the capture speed. I've even seen desktop drive reviews where 7200 rpm drives were slower than 5400 rpm drives, so just saying that higher rpm's are better isn't necessarily correct.

I read this here earlier this morning...
http://www.barefeats.com/mbcd7.html
CONCLUSIONS
These latest test results reveal that,
a) The 7200rpm drives are the fastest when empty...

b)... but if you have 74GB of data on each of the drives, the 4200rpm drive was actually faster. That's because 74GB of data puts the 7200rpm drive at 80% capacity while the 200GB 4200rpm drive is only at 40% capacity. (See "74G Mark" graphs above.)

When we compared a 5400rpm 160GB drive with 148GB of data with the read/write speed of the 4200rpm 200GB drive with 148GB of data, the 4200rpm drive is running 23% faster at that point. So as the amount of data increases, the advantage of the larger capacity 4200rpm drive grows. However, at that point, the transfer speed of the 4200rpm drive has dropped from 37MB/s to 27MB/s. So if you need to maintain a certain transfer speed , you might consider two 100GB 7200rpm drives in a striped array. (See "148G Mark" graphs below under STORAGE EXPANSION.)

b) There are differences in speed between brands. Hitachi tended to be slightly faster overall than Seagate. So if your MacBook Pro comes with a Hitachi 7200rpm or 5400rpm drive, you get the "lucky dog" award (as they say in NASCAR).

c) Though one PC site measured the 160GB 5400rpm drive averaging 130% faster than the 200GB 4200rpm drive, our tests showed it to be zero to 13% faster (depending on what brand of 5400rpm drive). The 7200rpm drives were 18% to 22% faster on average than the 4200rpm drive (depending on what brand of drive). All that to say that if capacity is just as valuable as speed, you're not foolish to go with the slower rpm higher capacity drive.

d) If you are concerned about battery usage (and heat generation), the 5400rpm drives had a lower wattage rating than the 7200rpm or the 4200rpm drives. Based on capacity, speed, and power usage, it's easy to see why Apple's standard drive choice for the MacBook Pro is the 5400rpm model.

barefeats is an amazing resource...

What I took away from this article, was not only spped a important factor, but the size of the drive as well. This is due to the slowdown all drives experience as they fill with data.