Opinion: 100GB7200 or 250GB5400 hard drive to use ??

[dorronto]

Which hard drive should I keep for a basic T60 laptop for general use only, nothing heavy duty..I have both at home already....

100GB 7200 RPM or 250GB 5400RPM hard drive?

...pro's and con's from the EXPERTS would be appreciated..

Thnaks,
Ron

[robert213]

Why not 250GB and 7200 rpms?

Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 250GB
Western Digital Scorpio Black 250GB


I have been backing up data using...

1) Silver Stone Raven RSV-01 USB HDD enclosure
2) Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B 500GB

[dsvochak]

Ron—

Is this a trick question where the answer you’re looking for is: sell both and buy a SSD?

The 250 gb would be easier to sell and would bring more cash. Since I haven’t seen any real life operational differences between 5400 and 7200 drives on 6x machines, keep the 250 gb drive if you need/want the storage space and keep the 100 gb if not.

[dorronto]

Ron—

Is this a trick question where the answer you’re looking for is: sell both and buy a SSD?

The 250 gb would be easier to sell and would bring more cash. Since I haven’t seen any real life operational differences between 5400 and 7200 drives on 6x machines, keep the 250 gb drive if you need/want the storage space and keep the 100 gb if not.

No, this is not a trick question..

just curious what everyone else would do...

Ron

PS..but here's the trick question you're looking for:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

[Navck]

Pay 100 dollars for a cheap 40GB MLC SSD with questionable wear leveling implementation and having equal rewrite rates as a harddrive[1] in small random reads due to bad controller implementation that does not properly remap sectors? Sure, that is totally a bargin.

As for the 100GB/7.2k vs 250GB/5.4k, this depends on the drive manufacturer, specific model and interface. However for the general stuff:
If we assume both drives have proper engineering and come from the same generation with an addition of possibly using some related components/platform...
100GB 7.2k will mean you'll have less rotational latency.
250GB 5.4k might mean you'll see higher sequential rates due to higher aerial density IF and ONLY IF both drives have the same platter count
This becomes a challenge once you mess with how many platters are in the drive and what their density is (Three platters in the 250GB? One in the 100GB?)
As for rotational latency, harddrives do not necessarily read all the data on the first pass nor are they able to get onto the track within the first pass. The head might not be able to get there in time before it needs to wait for the next rotation, or it might have issues servoing onto the track due to bad SNR.

It'd help if I knew more about the harddrives so I could consult with an engineer friend.

[1]A similar problem
faces flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs). SSDs are
organized into “pages” that are erased before being
written, and erase is relatively slow. While small
random reads of SSDs are about 100 times faster than
today’s magnetic disks, simple SSDs (ie., Memoright,
MTron) that read-erase-write each modified page
deliver small random write performance no better than
magnetic disks,
http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewconte ... ontext=pdl

[ZaZ]

If you don't need the space, I'd vote for the 7200RPM for the better latency.