[SOLVED] Is 7200rpm pointless anymore?

jailhousews

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May 8, 2012
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So assuming you are using solid state for operating system at least, does it really matter if you use a HDD for extended storage what you choose as long as it's reliable?
I remember spending extra back in the day (circa 2009) to get a huge 500GB (lol) HDD with a sizeable cache and 7200rpm. Because back then, that's where the OS was installed.
Now I'm putting together a new rig and ordered a 1TB M.2 NVME drive already. Was planning to just transplant my HDD for a little more storage and plan to add more later as needed, maybe even another M.2 since my MB has a second slot fore it. But then I figure, hey I can buy a HDD now for so cheap, why not do that and still add the other later?

I was looking at the Barracuda drives the 4TB seems good, although I noticed it's 5400rpm whereas if I drop down to 2TB I get 7200rpm. Does it really even matter for something that mostly just for storage? I mean, mabye I'll being installing things to it.
 
Solution
Yes it still matters. As long as the storage drive is local and you don't want to wait forever for something on the HDD to load, you need to go with the 7200 RPM drives. Honestly I wish Western Digital still made their 10,000 RPM Raptor drives, they were super fast but made pointless by the invention of the SSD.

Now, if your storage is all going to be network storage, it really doesn't matter for a small setup whether your network storage is 7200 rpm or 5400rpm.

JerryC

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Nov 20, 2007
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Yes it still matters. As long as the storage drive is local and you don't want to wait forever for something on the HDD to load, you need to go with the 7200 RPM drives. Honestly I wish Western Digital still made their 10,000 RPM Raptor drives, they were super fast but made pointless by the invention of the SSD.

Now, if your storage is all going to be network storage, it really doesn't matter for a small setup whether your network storage is 7200 rpm or 5400rpm.
 
Solution

beers

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Oct 4, 2012
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Does it really even matter for something that mostly just for storage? I mean, mabye I'll being installing things to it.
Bulk media storage, not really. You'll notice it in loading games though. Personally I'd just make the jump to all solid state if you don't have a buttload of media.
it really doesn't matter for a small setup whether your network storage is 7200 rpm or 5400rpm
You still have the same rotational latency, if you network installed a game over SMB/CIFS then the performance would be worse on 5400rpm. Also your inner-diameter transfers at the end of the drive capacity would be noticeably lower than gigabit and the 7200 derivative (of which a RAID mechanism could compensate for on sequential transfers).