Hard Drive Purchasing: A 7200rpm or 5400rpm Hard Drive?
When you purchase a hard drive for a computer, one of the choices you may need to make is if the hard drive will be a 7200rpm hard drive or a 5400rpm hard drive. As you may have already guessed, the rpm of a hard drive is one of the factors that is considered in assessing a hard drive’s speed, and a 7200rpm hard drive spins faster than a 5400rpm hard drive and therefore can access data faster.
One of the problems with 7200rpm and faster hard drives is heat. When it comes to computers and their components, heat is a killer. A 7200rpm hard drive (and even a machine with two 7200rpm hard drives) should do quite well in terms of heat. Once you start moving to hard drive that run at 10,000rpm or more, however (e.g. Seagate Cheetah drives), then you need to consider special cooling for the drives to keep the temperature of the computer down to a safe level.
So for desktop machines, I recommend 7200rpm hard drives. You may pay a little extra but the performance increase you will see is well worth the few extra bucks. Laptop hard drives are a different story — you can read my post on that specific topic to see what kind of drive to put in your laptop computer.
Related Posts
One Comment
Leave a reply
We are currently offering a free copy of our 16-page eBook, "How to Organize your Digital Photography Collection" to everyone who signs up for our free newsletter. This eBook will review how to organize your digital photos, discuss metadata, and give you an overview of software than can help you with your digital photography workflow. Sign up in the signup area, located in the right-side column of every page on this site, and read your copy now!
freecomputerJuly 31, 2010 at 11:10 pm
If you are replacing your primary hard drive, make sure you back up any data you want to save before you start. If you don’t want to reinstall Windows, you can clone the contents of your old hard drive to your new one using the setup utilities that hard drive manufacturers provide, or you can use a specific cloning program like HDClone or PC Inspector Clone Maxx. All of the above-mentioned utilities are available on the Ultimate Boot CD, so you can download and burn that and then choose the utility that is easiest for you to understand. (If you don’t have access to a high-speed internet connection, you can order a CD for a small fee.)
If you are willing to reinstall Windows, make sure you have discs for Windows and all your programs. This will prevent frustrations about losing programs after you have already formatted your computer.
If you are simply installing a secondary hard drive for storage, you don’t have to make any changes to the configuration of your current hard drive. If, however, you are installing a second IDE drive, it is possible that you will need to alter the jumper configuration of your primary hard drive. If your current hard drive is set as “Cable Select” (meaning it is the only drive on the channel), then you may need to change it to “Master” which will allow you to add the second hard drive as a slave (see below).