7200 vs 5400 rpm drives

[ac12]

I was just comparing the specs for the 500GB WD Scorpio blue (5400rpm) and black (7000rpm) drives. The black has a slightly LOWER power consumption than the blue. So going to a 5400 rpm blue drive to save battery power is not a correct decision.

So then is there a benefit of the 5400 rpm driver over the 7000 rpm drive, aside from a slightly lower price?

[ausmike]

I generally get Hitachi 7K Series of SAME SIZE from here , as Hit.* seems to always run with lower power and quiter and longer for me, - but now Segate makes 'lenovo' specs also!

[rumbero]

Since the Scorpio Black drives have five years of warranty, as opposed to only three years for the Scorpio Blue, i don't see any price advantage for any of the Scorpio Blue drives. I always prefer more warranty and speed as provided by the Scorpio Black. Scorpio Blue are just cheaper, and that doesn't only refer to their price, as you simply just get less for less.

[sir_synthsalot]

The black has a slightly LOWER power consumption than the blue.

Surprised to hear that. Is this for the same capacity drive?

So then is there a benefit of the 5400 rpm driver over the 7000 rpm drive, aside from a slightly lower price?

It might be less noisy, and maybe even run a little cooler. That seems to be the case for their desktop drives. I have both a WD Black and a WD Blue on desktops and the Blue is silent while the Black makes those nice hard drive seek grinding noises. Although I would expect laptop drives to be a lot quieter than that. I have a Scorpio Blue as well and I am happy with it. Never had the Scorpio Black though.

[loyukfai]

Not sure if the Black uses less power than Blue, but the difference between contemporary generations is probably trivial and won't make a significant difference in everyday uses.

If the price difference is not large, I would say go for the Black.

There is a benchmark of various drives here:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... undup.html

But it didn't test the Black as the Black didn't have a large capacity model at that time. Nonetheless I think it's worth a read.

There's a review of the Black (and the Blue) here, but it seems power consumption wasn't tested...

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1658/1/

There are not many HDD reviews these days, they're "boring" compared to SSD...

Cheers.

[ac12]

I was looking at the WD web site and the specs for both the 500GB Scorpio blue and black drives.
I wanted to see what I was giving up by going to a 7000rpm drive vs. a 5400rpm drive.
I was surprised to see the power consumption was essentially the same, and this was my important comparison item. So for battery life, it does not make any difference between the blue and black. This made the decision to go with the higher performance 7000rpm drive easier.

I did not check the noise, as that was not really important to me.

BTW, the 7000rpm Seagate 500G drive speced at slightly lower power consumption than the Scorpio black, so I went with the Seagate drive.

[sir_synthsalot]

There are discrepancies in the power consumption WD lists depending on where you look. In the PDF version of the specifications the numbers are different than on the web site for some of their drives. The 500 GB Blue is 1.6 W if you look at the PDFs. On the web site on the other hand it says the 500 GB Blue is 2.5 W. Same model numbers.

[loyukfai]

I would not place much emphasis on the power consumption figures provided by the disk makers. Information from independent benchmarks is a better indicator.

The difference is probably trivial among drives of contemporary generations, and it's not something I would worry about much.

Your power management strategy (e.g. spin-down timer, usage pattern) is likely to make a larger difference.

There's a page about power consumption in the review I linked above. Unfortunately it doesn't have both the latest Scorpio Blue and Black, but in general, 7.2K drives consume more power than their 5.4k brethrens.

According to this study (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do ... 1&type=pdf), which is done on a R40, the drive usually consumes about 5% of the power of the whole system, unless you're doing disk-heavy operations all the time.

Personally I don't think it is worth the time to research further when the difference in battery life is not likely to exceed 10-minute, or even less, in everyday uses. I've probably already spent too much time writing this.

Cheers.

[jpoke]

I would generally go for speed, but also the one which runs cooler... Since there is a threshold up to which i will tolerate heat ( the best would be for it to produce no heat at all )..

So I would chose the hard drive by prioritizing these things:

1. Speed
2. Heat
3. Price
4. Power Consumption

Of course they are interrelated but then again it depends on your finances... Personally I have an SSD running and it is really awesome tho SSD's are quite pricy but they do deliver outstanding performance, they consume less, they last longer and they dont heat up as much.

I am not exactly sure how much of a performance boost is 7200 rpm vs 5400 rpm tho... But i think it could be negligible, especially as HDD's are usually not that good with sequential reads. So in this case.. if i was in your shoes, depending on the price i think i might go with 5400 rpm