7200 RPM Performance

A question to those who have replaced their hard drive with a 7200 RPM device. Have you noticed much of an improvement after replacement? Was the upgrade worth the hassle of opening the case yet again? I have a 320gb device that could either be used in the Aspire One or go elsewhere. I'm trying to determine if the upgrade is worth the trouble.

 

I debated the same thing before I upgraded although my main concern was additional drain on the battery but from what I am experiencing now, that is minimal. The performance is anywhere from 10 to 25 percent decrease in time to access data from the hard drive. Boot up is about 10 to 15 seconds faster and access to the desktop is also much quicker.

In my opinion, the upgrade to the 7200 RPM drive was well worth the install time. If you want XP on it, make sure you backup your existing partitions before you do the upgrade.

Good luck!

 

If you have a 7200RPM hdd from a year or 2 ago, it'll actually be slower than the 5400RPM drive.

BTW. my windows XP OS boots under 20 seconds with 5400RPM 160GB hdd. Access time rarely have any effect on the boot time.

 

Can you post one example of this theory please?

 

E.G... Samsung SpinPoint M60S 500GB 5400rpm Hard Drive vs Seagate Momentus 7200.2 7200rpm 160GB Hard Drive.

Just check out their benchmark and you'll see that the Samsung 5400RPM hdd is about 20% faster than the 7200RPM drive Seagate hdd.

 

The 7200.2 160GB is quite old now and has a much lower areal bit density than a modern 500GB drive. I suspect that anyone that was looking to replace their stock hard drive with a 7200rpm device would choose a more recent model with a higher capacity.

Tom's Hardware did an extensive evaluation of 2.5" drives and the Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB seems to be King of the Hill at the moment. Interestingly even the Samsung 500GB 5400rpm drive is beaten by Samsung's own 7200rpm 250GB device in many of the benchmarks.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/not ... 06-11.html

jackluo923 raises an interesting point though. 500GB 5400rpm drives cost about the same as 320GB 7200rpm drives. Power consumption is about the same and performance of the former is not far behind the latter. Performance of either will almost certainly be a noticeable improvement over the smaller capacity 5400rpm drives that Acer installed at the factory.

 

If you've looked closely at my earlier post, that guy was asking to prove
"If you have a 7200RPM hdd from a year or 2 ago, it'll actually be slower than the 5400RPM drive. "
was true.

So I gave an example of an old 7200RPM HDD vs a new 5400RPM HDD.

 

ronime thx for reference. I just wondered because as far I know only speed improvement in past 2 years that would be so much better to get 5400 drive faster than 7200 is vertical writing system and than again its reserved for 500GB and above. Every single drive in past 2 years have NCQ, large cache capacity and few other techies. I mean the point is that current models below 500GB and those 2 years before at same rotating speeds are very comparable, so imho I dont think that buying cheap 2 year old drive is bad investment - besides it is very questionable is new drive supported or will crappy Acer BIOS developers include support for it in near future.

 

The majority of the speed improvement from modern HDDs are perpendicular writing technique, NCQ (useless on acer aspire one because it doesnt' support ahci), sata 150 interface (modern hdd burst speed can be as high as 150MB-200MB/s)
Apparently.. the scorpio blue line (WD 5400RPM HDDS, the one that's on my acer aspire one) out performs Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 in average read benchmark. :mrgreen: AAO's 5400RPM hdd pwns. :lol:

 

Yes "perpendicular" in mine language is called vertical because of polarity how it writes but as I said that technology is mainly reserved for large capacity drives...

 

I have looked closely and the OP made no mention of older generation 7200rpm drives, and certainly not 160GB capacity. The first reference to 2-year old drives was made by your good self. What made you think that the OP would want to replace a fairly modern 5400rpm drive with an older 160GB 7200rpm device?

 

Many sub-500GB drives use perpendicular recording to increase areal bit densities, the Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB being one of them. I disagree that performance of sub-500GB drives has not improved in the past 2 years. I would be interested to see evidence to support this.

There are a few users on this forum that are already using 500GB drives, so I can't see there being any BIOS issues.

I would want to see the SMART attributes for a 2-year old drive before I started using it. Do bear in mind that power consumption will probably be much better with more recent models, which may be important if you are trying to get the most out of a 3-cell battery. The Samsung 500GB drive previously mentioned does not impress at all in the power consumption stakes according to Tom's Hardware.

 

There appears to be significant variance in performance across the range of available 2.5" SATA drives. Some of the 7200rpm devices are quite disappointing, but on paper at least, the best 7200rpm devices appear to have a clear advantage whilst offering more than acceptable power consumption. It would be interesting to see if these devices maintain their advantage in a non-NCQ environment.

The WDC 160GB drive in one of my AA1s is noticeably more performant than the HGST 120GB in the other (the HGST equipped AA1 has significantly lower power consumption though, which may or may be attributed to the HDD, particularly the fact that the crappy WDC firmware stops APM from working properly).

 

I made that statement to note that there are no some significant changes in drives without vertical reading in past 2 years. Ofc. there are some but not high enough to claim average older 7200 to be slower than average new 5400. There is hybrid drives but than again other than some Seagate or Samsung 3.5" I didnt heard any movment in that direction...

 

They guy that i'm trying to proof new 5400RPM drives are faster than old 7200RPM drive was sumbody not the OP.

 

So, after a fierce debate and a few sidetracks, the advice would seem to be:

It depends on the age of the 7200rpm drive you have to swap in and whether your current 5400rpm drive is one of the faster OEM drives (WDC?) that Acer used in the factory.

My gut feeling is that your 320GB 7200rpm drive probably has sufficient areal bit density to make a difference compared to your current 5400rpm drive, assuming that you are using a factory installed drive of <= 160GB capacity.

The basic (free) edition of HDTune should give you an idea of performance of both drives. My 120GB HGST drive reports a sustained transfer rate of less than 50MB/s max. My 160GB WDC drive reports a little over 65MB/s max. I would expect one of the better 7200rpm drives to achieve over 80MB/s.

The perceived advantage of 80MB/s over 65MB/s may not be all that great but you should be able to feel an improvement if you replace a 50MB/s device with an 80MB/s device.

 

what is the read/write speed on a 7.2k rpm hdd for netbooks? 100mb read/write?

 

@runtohell - around 80MB/s

My 160GB WD scorpio blue gets around 70-75MB/s throughput.

 

not in the 100s mb read/write? x.x
i was expecting similar results as my desktop 3.5" 7.2k rpm

 

I also believe that the AA1 does not support SATAII specs. I ran HDtach on my AA1 and took the drive and put it in my desktop and ran HDtach. I will post results when I feel like getting the cats off of my lap but of course, it was faster then in the AA1. I looking into a PCI RAID card to see if I could squeeze it into the AA1 along with 2-Samsung 1.8" drives lol. Too much to figure out though

BTW, I am going to get the new Samsung 32gb SLC SSD. I have the Micro to SATA adapter already, just need to get the drive ordered. When I get it installed I will start a new thread with install pics and HDtach.