Question Using both 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM HDDs for storage ?

[HWright001]

I now own six 14-TB Western Digital Red Drives that I use for raw storage. (Non-RAID.) 4 of which are the 5400 RPM version which is the WD140EFFX model and, unfortunately, I have come to find out that 2 are the 7200 RPM "WD Red Plus" model (WD140EFGX). I have slowly acquired these drives over the last few years from a few different sellers on Amazon and naively thought they were all 5400 RPMs. They were all listed as such, but I have come to find out various sellers mistake RPM versions often. I know I am quite the fool for not checking the model numbers 1st, but it is what it is and I think all drives are probably outside the return window. Only recently have I actually noticed that 2 are different models from the other 4. With all that, I have 2 questions:

1. I know that 5400 RPMs are generally considered more reliable for storage, but is the difference so great that I should be worried about replacing the two 7200 drives if I'm worried about long-term storage? My understanding is that recent drives show little difference in reliability between 5400 vs 7200 rpm versions or is this incorrect? They have been good working drives for several months now so I can't complain about current performance.

2. Is it safe to "mix" different RPM drives in the same hard drive enclosure? I have two 4-slot HDD enclosures and due to the time I have acquired each drive, each enclosure now has one 7200 RPM drive and the rest 5400. Does this matter? Should both 7200 rpm drives be in there own enclosure?

Thanks with whatever clarification you can provide.

 

[Lafong]

1. I know that 5400 RPMs are generally considered more reliable for storage,

What's the best evidence of that?

It might be true; I'm just asking. Any links or semi-authoritative references?

Offhand, I'd think the more important question would be: "are you prepared for any or all of these drives to fail completely at any time?". You may have the contents backed up elsewhere or the contents may not be very important to you. I don't know. But surely all of those drives will fail at some point. I wouldn't get highly wound up on any distinctions between them.

 

[helpstar]

the 7200 ones are usually faster than the 5400 models, but doesn´t matter in your long term backup plan. You can mix all you want, doesn´t result in more failure than usual.
For backup it´s important that you always have in mind that anytime any storage device can get faulty. Redundancy is the key for a good backup plan.

lifespan depends on using the drives as well, if you don´t use the drives daily and just copy backup files, you won´t see a difference. If you use all daily and copy/move files all the time, the 5400 models should be more reliable. But in terms of lifespan, this difference can´t be foreseen and is rather small.

 

[SkyNetRising]

1. I know that 5400 RPMs are generally considered more reliable for storage

Not really.

2. Is it safe to "mix" different RPM drives in the same hard drive enclosure?

If they get plenty of cooling, then that doesn't matter.

 

[fzabkar]

For a while, WD was labeling some 7200 RPM models as "5400 RPM class".

In fact, the WD140EFFX ("Performance Class: 5400 RPM") does look like a 7200 RPM drive:

https://aphnetworks.com/reviews/western-digital-red-wd140effx-14tb/7

Notice that the width of the access time graph is about 8ms, which corresponds to the rotational latency at 7200RPM. The latency at 5400 RPM would be 11ms.

https://aphnetworks.com/review/western-digital-red-wd140effx-14tb/hdtune.png

See these threads for actual test results:

https://web.archive.org/web/2020071...ic/7859-5400-rpm-class-hdd-spins-at-7200-rpm/

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=38333