How Important is RPM for Hard Drives


Looking to purchase another 2tb SATA drive for music storage. I'm seeing 7200 rpm drives that are maybe a bit noisier and run a bit warmer than 5400 rpm drives that are cooler but slower. The 7200 drive (Hitachi) may be a tad more reliable than the 5400 Western Digital or Seagate - not sure. I do plenty of backup anyway.

Thing is, with over 1.5 Tb of music, I imagine seek times can be somewhat slow. Once a music file is found, there ae no skips or pauses with itunes. Does the rotation speed matter much for seek times on such a large music library, or is the rpm more an issue for writing/reading higher bandwidth information than music?

Thanks, Peter
peter_s

Showing 2 responses by peter_s

I am mostly investing in cheap 2tb drives and making sure I have several redundent backups. I had a RAID drive but it was super noisy and the disks didn't stop spinning when my computer slept. Perhaps a better RAID drive would help. I'm basically buying naked SATA drives and putting them in existing enclosures.
Thanks. Got the 5400 green drive. I don't mind waiting longer for the backup to occur!