Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ

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%

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.