5400RPM 2.5 drive faster than 7200RPM 3.5 drive?

[burnttoastnice]

So currently in my system I have three 5400RPM laptop drives - a 500GB SSHD, a 750GB HDD and a 160GB HDD, as well as one 7200RPM 250GB desktop drive currently being tested for bad sectors. But I've noticed that the 5400RPM drives have a higher sequential transfer speed than the 7200RPM drive?

 

I was thinking that the faster 7200RPM platter speed would result in a faster speed and lower seek latency, or is this being hindered by the fact the drive is of a lower capacity compared to the 5400's?

 

5400RPM

Seagate 500GB SSHD - 100MB/s Seq (system drive)

Seagate 750GB HDD - 110MB/s Seq (games)

Hitachi 160GB HDD - 67MB/s Seq (tempfiles)

 

7200RPM

Seagate 250GB HDD - 87MB/s Seq

 

[CoffeeBerry]

I believe that 7200RPM thing was true in the past. But nowadays it's a different ball game. Here: http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/choosing-high-performance-storage-is-not-about-rpm-anymore-master-ti/

 

Well, they talk about SSHD's here, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

EDIT: Here's another link: http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-higher-rpm-hard-drives-rip-you-off/

[jnvqc]

As drivers fill up their performance decreases abruptly, also there's fragmentation to take in account, if you want the true performance of a drive, format it first, this way is pointless...

[jnvqc]

example:

source: http://www.hdtune.com/

The y axis represents the transfer speed(blue line)/ access time(yellow dots), the x axis the amount of data in the disk.

As you can see the transfer speed went from 171 to 85, on a empty drive to a full one.

Seeing your screenshots for a second time there're so many variables, just because a drive is 7200 rpm doesn't mean it is fast, for starters the platter density of a 250gb 3.5 hdd is very low and that impacts performance, the drive's age is also important.