Understanding the difference between 5400 and 7200 RPM hard drives is very important if you are thinking about upgrading the hard drive (HDD) of your system.
The speed at which data can be transferred from the platters storing bits to the computer (data throughput) determines the performance of a hard drive. This means a high density of platters and revolution per minute will give a high level of performance and this does not imply that drives of lower RPM should be ignored.
5400 RPM and 7200 RPM
Although the most popular Hard Drives for desktops and laptops are between 5400 and 7200 RPM, you can also find hard drives spinning up to 15000RPM.
Hard drives operating at 7200 RPM offer fast read, improved write speed which make them more suited for running OS performance, faster file transfer and quicker program execution.
The cons as regards this Hard Drives is that they can be costly, and tend to generate more heat than the 5400RPM counterpart. They can also be noisy with shorter lifespan compared to the ones with lower RPM.
Hard drives with 5400RPM, as expected, has a slower file transfer speed but consumes lesser power and as such tend to generate less heat with little noise. They are less expensive and also a very good choice for storing large files.
Let me quickly mention to you that 5400RPM drives has an average read/write speed of 100MB/s while 7200RPM hard drives offers 120MB/s read and write speed. Therefore, for informed decision making, both drives are virtually identical but 7200RPM hard drives has 20 percent speed advantage over 5400RPM drives.
To this end, if you are looking to just store files, I will advice you go for 5400 but if you are considering performance then 7200RPM is your go-to.
Though I am focusing on the traditional rotating platter hard drives for to data storage but it is important to mention that there are hybrid drives and Solid State drives which offer better performance but don’t offer as much capacity as the traditional drives and also for now they are quite expensive.
In choosing a hard drive, capacity and performance are the basic things to consider. For brand, you can choose any brand that works for you.
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Sayo Alabi
Content creator for Vanaplus Group.