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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 1 response by sufentanil

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sufentanil
782 posts
 
Magfan, ALL of the RAID configurations you mention except RAID 0 offer redundancy and can reconstruct a failed drive in the system, not just RAID 5. RAID 5 is simply more efficient when you consider the number of drives that are necessary vs the usable total storage space.

RAID being a goner???! WTF?! Every motherboard sold nowadays has RAID capabilities built-in, and even several external HD enclosures offer the capability of 2 drives in RAID 0 or 1, not to mention the multitude of companies making NAS's.

Michael
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