[SOLVED] 5400 vs 7200 real time difference for accessing files?

_dawn_chorus_

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I have about 10 years of photos I want to go through and organize, so I will be opening closing and reopening many many photos and videos.
Looking at the WD Blue 4tb which is 5400rpm and am just wondering if I will notice a difference in read times for the use case I described.
 
Solution
20% slower. It's not much. ~100MB/s for the 5400RPM and ~120MB/s for the 7200RPM. You will barely see the difference.
Also keep in mind that the new drive may have higher-density platters that could counteract those performance losses for sequential performance, particularly if that 1TB drive is an earlier model with multiple 500GB (or lower) platters. With a higher density, the drive can potentially transfer more data for each revolution, even if the spindle size is slower. Lower RPM drives do tend to have worse random access performance though, so accessing a large number of tiny files at once could still be slower.

And SMR drives, which are designed to pack more data into the same space at the expense of performance, can...
a 7200RPM drive is around 20% faster than a 5400RPM drive.

I hope you have your 10 years of photos backed up somewhere else or you might lose that 10 years inside a minute if your drive fail.

If you open a lot of photos or videos at the same time a HDD will be slow no matter what. If you want something fast get a SSD.
 
a 7200RPM drive is around 20% faster than a 5400RPM drive.

I hope you have your 10 years of photos backed up somewhere else or you might lose that 10 years inside a minute if your drive fail.

If you open a lot of photos or videos at the same time a HDD will be slow no matter what. If you want something fast get a SSD.
 

_dawn_chorus_

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Aug 30, 2017
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a 7200RPM drive is around 20% faster than a 5400RPM drive.

I hope you have your 10 years of photos backed up somewhere else or you might lose that 10 years inside a minute if your drive fail.

If you open a lot of photos or videos at the same time a HDD will be slow no matter what. If you want something fast get a SSD.

I do indeed have a couple backups. The rest of my system is ssds. I have an older WD Blue 1tb that is reasonably fast opening the files, I want to replace it with a larger version but they are all 5400rpm.. so I am just wondering if it would really feel much slower when accessing those types of files.
 
I do indeed have a couple backups. The rest of my system is ssds. I have an older WD Blue 1tb that is reasonably fast opening the files, I want to replace it with a larger version but they are all 5400rpm.. so I am just wondering if it would really feel much slower when accessing those types of files.

20% slower. It's not much. ~100MB/s for the 5400RPM and ~120MB/s for the 7200RPM. You will barely see the difference.
 
20% slower. It's not much. ~100MB/s for the 5400RPM and ~120MB/s for the 7200RPM. You will barely see the difference.
Also keep in mind that the new drive may have higher-density platters that could counteract those performance losses for sequential performance, particularly if that 1TB drive is an earlier model with multiple 500GB (or lower) platters. With a higher density, the drive can potentially transfer more data for each revolution, even if the spindle size is slower. Lower RPM drives do tend to have worse random access performance though, so accessing a large number of tiny files at once could still be slower.

And SMR drives, which are designed to pack more data into the same space at the expense of performance, can perform significantly slower at writing many gigabytes of data to the drive within a short period compared to standard CMR drives, which may be something else to consider. Manufacturers may not even advertise what technology a particular drive is using. Usually though, those drive with much larger caches (like 256MB) will be the ones utilizing the slower SMR tech, as they need the extra cache when organizing the data prior to writing it to the drive.
 
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Solution
Also keep in mind that the new drive may have higher-density platters that could counteract those performance losses for sequential performance, particularly if that 1TB drive is an earlier model with multiple 500GB (or lower) platters. With a higher density, the drive can potentially transfer more data for each revolution, even if the spindle size is slower. Lower RPM drives do tend to have worse random access performance though, so accessing a large number of tiny files at once could still be slower.

And SMR drives, which are designed to pack more data into the same space at the expense of performance, can perform significantly slower at writing many gigabytes of data to the drive within a short period compared to standard CMR drives, which may be something else to consider. Manufacturers may not even advertise what technology a particular drive is using. Usually though, those drive with much larger caches (like 256MB) will be the ones utilizing the slower SMR tech, as they need the extra cache when organizing the data prior to writing it to the drive.

You're totally right. I didn't want to go in details here. OP will like that explication.