The RPM Factor

RPM, or revolutions per minute, is the measure of instances that the motor of the hard drive can rotate the platters by a full 360 degrees. Currently, there are various drives from a few different manufacturers that can rotate their platters 10,000 to 15,000 times per minute, or 15,000RPM. The most common drives today are rated at 7200RPM like our 400GB 7200.8 Seagate Barracuda, and there are still many 5400RPM drives around also.

So, does the speed of a drive's motor really make a difference in the performance of a drive? If we look at just the speed of the motor, then yes, there is a great performance boost from a 7200RPM drive to a 10,000 or 15,000RPM drive. The faster that the motor can rotate the platters, the quicker that the read and write heads can do their job on the platters. But there are other factors that come into play when measuring the performance of a hard disk drive. SATA based drives have a maximum data transfer rate of 150MBs/sec (megabytes per second) while IDE drives top out at 133MBs/sec. The transfer rate can be enough to even things out under certain circumstances. The same goes for the amount of cache on the drive. A 7200RPM drive with 16MB of cache has been proven to compete with a 10,000RPM drive with 8MB of cache, again, in certain situations.

We have taken two of the latest drives from Maxtor that we could get our hands on to compare the differences in performance between the DiamondMax 16 series 160GB drive with a 5400RPM motor, and the DiamondMax Plus 9 series 160GB unit with a 7200RPM motor. Both drives are of the PATA/133 flavor, have 8MB buffers on board, and have a total of two 80GB platters each. With the physical specifications being identical in every aspect, let's take a look at how the two units compare in performance based on their spindle speed.

5400RPM vs 7200RPM Spindle Speed
DiamondMax
Plus 9
(7200RPM)
DiamondMax 16
(5400RPM)
7200RPM Performance Advantage
SYSMark 2004 - Internet Content Creation Performance
Overall
195
191
2.09%
3D Content Creation
174
172
1.16%
2D Content Creation
251
244
2.87%
Web Publication
170
167
1.8%
SYSMark 2004 - Office Productivity - Communication Performance
Overall
153
144
6.25%
Communication
144
122
18.03%
SYSMark 2004 - Overall System Performance
Overall Performance
173
166
4.22%
Internet Content Creation
195
191
2.09%
Office Productivity
153
144
6.25%
Winstone 2004 - Overall System Performance
Business
25.5

25

2%
Multimedia Content Creation

31.5

31.5
0
Pure Hard Disk Performance - IPEAK, Winstone 2004
Business
442
383
15.4%
Multimedia Content Creation
267
238
12.18%
Real World Performance - File System Tasks (seconds)
File Zip (1 300MB File)
61.331
74.224
21.02%
File Zip (300 1MB Files)
62.811
72.594
15.58%
File UnZip (1 300MB File)
14.383
15.500
7.77%
File UnZip (300 1MB Files)
14.857
20.021
34.76%
Copy Folder (1 300MB File)
5.765
8.216
42.52%
Copy Folder (300 1MB Files)
8.078
11.443
41.66%
Real World Performance - Application Load Times (seconds)
Photoshop CS
8.263
9.269
12.17%
Office 2003 - Word
1.984
3.355
69.1%
Office 2003 - Excel
2.323
2.979
28.24%
Office 2003 - Access
1.662

3.816

29.6%
Office 2003 - PowerPoint
2.289
3.823
67%
Real World Performance - Game Level Loading Times (seconds)
Half-Life 2 (d1_canals_01)
23.867
21.2
-12.58%
Doom 3 (caverns1)
45.667
47.567
4.16%
C&C: Generals (GLA C3S1)*
34.300
34.867
1.65%
Service Time
IPEAK Average Read Service Time
13.82
23.31
8.13%
WinBench 99 - Transfer Rate Test
Beginning
59400
47200
25.85%
End
33800
26800
26.12%
*C&C:Generals playing as GLA (campaign 3, stage 1)

The greatest performance increases were seen with our Real World File System Tasks as well as Application Load Time tests. The 7200RPM unit picked up data off its platters much more quickly than the 5400RPM drive. There is no question that a drive's spindle speed has a great effect on the overall performance of the drive. There were certain situations where the spindle speed made no difference like the game level load times, for example. The 5400RPM drive loaded Half-Life 2's d1_canals_01 map more than 2 seconds quicker on average than the 7200RPM mode. Still, this is not a large enough margin to conclude that a higher RPM does not have a positive impact on a drives overall performance.

Seagate on NCQ Hard Drive Buffer: Does Size Really Matter?
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  • PuravSanghani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    mjz5: With our nForce4 platform there is an option under the drive controllers options tab called "Enable command queuing". By checking this option and restarting the system, command queuing will be enabled. Some boards, however, enable NCQ/TCQ by default through the BIOS. You may want to check with your motherboard manual on that.

    Take care,

    Purav
  • mjz5 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Nighteye2 has a good question. How does NCQ work with RAID arrays? Is it better, worse???

    How would I know if TCQ is enabled on my 74 raptor?
  • xsilver - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    #21 LOL --- you wouldnt want that space anyways even if it was there.... its cant be guaranteed reliable so would you trust 100gb's of your drive that could die at any moment???
  • quorm - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I have one of the 300gb 7200.8 drives. It's mentioned in the article that all of the 7200.8 drives use a 3x133gb platter configuration. I was wondering if there is any hack to allow access to the remaining 100gb of disk space. Anyone?
  • AtaStrumf - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Hey, where did all the WD drives (apart from Raptor obviously) go??? I can get a 200 GB PATA model pretty cheap, so I'm seriously considering it. Any advice anyone?
  • n7 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Thanx for the review guys :)

    flatblastard: I'd agree.

    The Raptors may not win all the benches, but i find they feel so much snappier than my other 7200RPM drives.

    I certainly wouldn't mind adding a 400 Gb Seagate to my collection though :)

  • bob661 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Can you guys post a UT2004 for load time graph please.
  • flatblastard - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I'm using the raptor for my OS, and the 250GB seagate 7200.8 for everything else. I really can't tell which one is faster at loading games...but the raptor is MUCH quicker loading anything else.
  • Icehawk - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Where were the heavier real-world multi-tasking tests like in the Intel DC previews? In those articles it appeared that NCQ offered some performance boost in heavy I/O situations - here it seems to offer zero benefit.
  • Houdani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I dunno. Neither the Seagate nor the Maxtor NCQ drive really impressed me. They didn't stand out from the peleton. For most performance needs, I'd have to give the yellow jersey to the Raptor, although the idle heat is a noteworthy ding.

    For extra capacity one of the larger models would be prudent, but for a primary drive the Raptor is fairly impressive.

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