160gb/5400 vs 100gb/7200 speedwise?!

[dorin]

hi there,

someone said in this forum that due to higher density of the 160gb is pretty much no difference between these 2 models (hitachi of course).

is that true? i googled it but couldnt find anything (ur to understand spooky grapfs)

thanks,

dorin

[agarza]

The decising factor in deciding which HDD is faster to another is taking into account the relation of Buffer-Rotational Speed.

7200rpm HDD are unbeatable, but maybe if existed a 7200rpm with only 2MB of cache, then a 5400rpm drive with 8MB cache would have lower seek access times.

As a rule of thumb a 7200rpm drive is faster than a 5400rpm. This becomes particularly true when you transfer massive files or game a lot.

For sure a 5400rpm offers a reasonable performance, but a 7200rpm just have the edge on everything.

[tomh009]

With today's disks, the seek times (which actually are very similar on the 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm drives) are really not the critical factor, but the throughput (media transfer rate). From Hitachi's web site (http://www.hitachigst.com/):

5K160 (160 GB): 540 Mb/s
5K250 (250 GB): 665 Mb/s

7K100 (100 GB): 629 Mb/s
7K200 (200 GB): 876 Mb/s

To complete the comparisons, one should consider noise and power consumption as well -- here are the figures at idle:

5K160 (160 GB): 1.6W, 25 dbA
5K250 (250 GB): 1.7W, 24 dbA

7K100 (100 GB): 1.8W, 26 dbA
7K200 (200 GB): 2.0W, 25 dbA