HDD 5200rpm

Ankur

Active Member
1. What does rpm mean in HDD?

2. What will be the difference between 5200rpm and 7200rpm in Laptops?
 
In traditional hard drives RPM is how fast the platters spin. The faster they spin the faster data access is.

A 7200 drive in a laptop will make hard drive operations faster but take a little more battery power. It used to be that 7200rpm laptop drives couldn't have as much storage space as 5400rpm ones but I don't think that's still true.

Personally, I'd go for the 7200.
 
A 7200 drive in a laptop will make hard drive operations faster but take a little more battery power. It used to be that 7200rpm laptop drives couldn't have as much storage space as 5400rpm ones but I don't think that's still true.

Personally, I'd go for the 7200.

Oh! but the laptop that I've selected has 5200rpm HDD, but it's advantage is it is 1TB, other have 7200rpm and have 0.5TB space.
The main thing I need a big storage HDD and the more storage the less is the rpm.
 
Oh! but the laptop that I've selected has 5200rpm HDD, but it's advantage is it is 1TB, other have 7200rpm and have 0.5TB space.
The main thing I need a big storage HDD and the more storage the less is the rpm.

Why not get a laptop with a smaller, faster hard drive (thus potentially cheaper due to smaller size, but with greater performance) and buy an external hard drive for storage? It will work out cheaper, and if all your using the storage for is videos, music, pictures, graphics etc, it won't impair speed.
 
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Oh! but the laptop that I've selected has 5200rpm HDD, but it's advantage is it is 1TB, other have 7200rpm and have 0.5TB space.
The main thing I need a big storage HDD and the more storage the less is the rpm.
The reason I say I'd go for the faster one is...well...it's faster and I certainly don't need 1TB of space :P I could easily make do with a 60GB if they still made them.

If you really need that extra 500GB and don't want it in an external as suggested by Aastii then your decision is already made ;)
 
Hmm, I think I can go for 500GB and external. But talking about external HDD, are they safe as the in-built HDD, I had 2GB pendrive which was free of virus and I removed it safely still one day I found it's data was erased.
Also, what is the highest speed that I can get in a HDD(both external and internal)
 
You can get laptop drives up to 15000 rpm but I wouldn't use anything over 7200 because of the cooling needed for the higher rpm drives.

External drives will generally be in either 5400 or 7200 but you could build your own with whatever speed that you want to have. The downside of that is the faster drives are a lot more expensive than what a normal drive would be.

If you stick with 7200 for both your internal and external drives it will still be fairly fast.
 
RPM = revolutions per minute. More RPM = faster. Generally, faster drives are more power-hungry too, but it depends on the specific drive model as well. According to the specs sheets, my 7200rpm WD scorpio black had lower power draw than my older 5200rpm (or 5400, can't remember) Hitachi drive. I never noticed a difference in the battery life though.

And yes, faster drives tend to be smaller... generally 7200RPM hard drives don't go beyond 320GB or so (I know they exist though, I've come across a few 500GB scorpio blacks), while 500GB and even bigger ~5krpm drives are fairly common.
 
Hmm, I think I can go for 500GB and external. But talking about external HDD, are they safe as the in-built HDD, I had 2GB pendrive which was free of virus and I removed it safely still one day I found it's data was erased.

Generally externals are as safe as internal, they use standard magnetic disks unlike pendrives which use flash memory. Sometimes the external case can cause heat issues but that shouldn't be a problem with most of the models out there.
 
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