HDD Specification about SATA and RPMs

[Ayzou]

I need help in choosing between these two, a 6.0 gb/s and 5400 rpm OR 3.0 gb/s 7200 rpm. which is better for gaming? and does having a bigger CACHE means better? thank you in advance.

 

[kanewolf]

Usually a 7200 RPM drive will be better. The 1800 RPM drop degrades the real world throughput much more than the drop from 6Gb to 3Gb. Bigger cache is better. But it is very dependent on what you are doing. You probably don't want an 8MB cache any more but 32MB vs 64MB would probably be hard to notice in real world usage.

 

[Ayzou]

so I guess 7200 rpm and 3.0gb/s is the suggestion you're giving me? I really didn't get what you said. lol. I am noob sorry. and thank you too for the reply.

 

[kanewolf]

Yes, I would get a 7200 RPM drive. It takes an extra 0.000046 seconds for the 5400RPM drive to spin once. Seeking between tracks is slowed down because of the slower rotation. So EVERYTHING that disk does (other than transferring data on the SATA bus) is slower.

 

[Ayzou]

so 3.0 gb/s doesn't matter?

 

[kanewolf]

No, I didn't say it didn't matter, but if I have to trade 7200 RPM to 5400 RPM to get 6Gb, in my opinion it is a trade down. The reason SSD "feels" so fast compared to mechanical drives is that is goes from 7200 RPM to the equivalent of a billion RPM.

 

[Paperdoc]

Actually, 3 Gb/s versus 6 Gb/s does NOT matter for hard drives. There are NO mechanical hard drives (that is, ones with spinning disks and heads on moving arms) that can transfer data as fast as 3 Gb/s. So having the 6gb/s communication capability means nothing because the internals of the HDD cannot deliver data that fast to the communication system.

Get the 7200 rpm unit, and I agree that 8 MB is too small for a cache, but there is not much performance difference between 32 and 64 MB cache.

 

[Ayzou]

ok then you're answers are really appreciated and thank you for giving me a decent explanation.