Hard Drives: 10,000 RPM SATA 1.5, or 7200 RPM SATA 3.0?

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Hard Drives: 10,000 RPM SATA 1.5, or 7200 RPM SATA 3.0?

What will give better performance?

MatthewHSE

4:05 pm on Jun 15, 2007 (gmt 0)

I've been looking at new hard drives lately, and I've been struck by the fact that - apparently - the 10,000 RPM SATA drives out there only come in the SATA 1.5 gb/s interface. If you want the newer SATA 3.0 gb/s, you have to step down to 7200 RPM.

So what will give better performance: Higher RPM with lower transfer rates, or lower RPM with higher transfer rates?

Seems like a very confusing and illogical tradeoff to me...

Lord Majestic

4:11 pm on Jun 15, 2007 (gmt 0)

Actual transfer rates are lower than interface speeds - you are unlikely to see much different beween SATA 1.5 and 3.0 drives, all other things equal of course.

10k RPM will matter more than interface - 1.5G is enough, though bear in mind some of the newer disk drives like 1 TB from Hitachi are very fast due to high density of data - they are comparable to 10k IDE drives like Raptor in transfers, but if seek time matters then 10k RPM will win easy.

[edited by: Lord_Majestic at 4:13 pm (utc) on June 15, 2007]

jtara

7:27 pm on Jun 15, 2007 (gmt 0)

Just ignore the 1.5 vs. 3.0 issue, and pay attention to the other specs. It's nothing but marketing hype at this point, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. There aren't any drives that can saturate a 1.5 gbit/sec interface.

With parallel SCSI, interface speed mattered, because parallel SCSI is a bus. A system with several drives could easily saturate the interface, so at each step of increased interface speed, it made sense (at least for multi-drive setups) to upgrade.