What is the real-life difference between 5200 and 7200 HDD RPM?

[Sherwin Ianne Caliva]

Hi,

Considering I am playing games most of the time, is it worth to get the 7200RPM HDD?

Thanks in advance

 

[i7Baby]

It'll improve loading times, not playing fps.

An SSD will improve loading times by a lot more.

 

[Pinhedd]

Hi,

Considering I am playing games most of the time, is it worth to get the 7200RPM HDD?

Thanks in advance

Mean rotational latency for a 5,400 RPM hard disk drive = 5.55ms

Mean rotational latency for a 7,200 RPM hard disk drive = 4.16ms

The mean seek latency is independent from the rotational latency but it tends to be higher on lower RPM hard drives as they are typically designed for power efficiency.

All in all, the jump from a 5,400 RPM hard disk drive to an equivalent 7,200 RPM hard disk drive is quite substantial in performance alone, without getting into differences between 7,200 RPM hard disk drives themselves. You will notice a large difference in throughput between a Western Digital Green (nominally ~5,400 RPM) and a Western Digital Blue (nominally ~7,200 RPM) and a modest difference in throughput between a Western Digital Blue and a Western Digital Black (nominally ~7,200 RPM, but includes more powerful mechanical components and a more advanced hard disk controller).

The benefit to gaming is most evident in load times, but in games that like to stream assets straight from the storage media rather than store them in memory (a common memory management technique popularized by poor console ports) the impact will be more profound.

 

[Sherwin Ianne Caliva]

So, will the 7200 perform much faster like 30+ seconds or more compared to 5400?

 

[i7Baby]

About 80% of the time needed by a 5400 rpm drive

 

[Sherwin Ianne Caliva]

so, if a certain game loads 60 seconds on 5400 then how many seconds does 5400 need? 80% of 60 is 48

7200 hdd will load the same game for 48 seconds. Does 12 seconds loading times matter on gaming?

 

[i7Baby]

As I said - SSDs are a lot faster. They would turn 60 seconds into 20 seconds

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404258,00.asp