My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

[shovenose]

I never realized until today how slow 5400RPM laptop drives are!
In my bedside PC, I went from a 40GB 5400RPM 2.5" SATA drive to a 320GB 7200RPM 3.5" SAT (WD Caviar Blue)...


holy cow this shit is fast!

Only thing is that Windows 7 and 8 aren't compatible with my motherboard for some reason and I don't have a Vista install CD/DVD so I had to use XP.

BUT IT FLIES!!!!!!!!

[ratdude747]

Re: My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

well... yeah

laptop drives are slow anyway... atleast it wasn't a dreaded 4200RPM Travelstar... those are slow.

for desktop use, yeah, use 7200RPM.

for laptops and externals, 5400RPM has benifits (lower power consumption, less heat, better durability/shock resistance, etc.)

[Scenic]

Re: My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

I bet it's a singleplatter one..

http://de.hardware-wiki.org/wiki/Wes...iar_Blue-Serie

Select the model (my guess is WD3200AAKS). It'll show a list of firmware/hardware revisions and the amount of platters/heads (platter/köpfe ; abbreviated as p/k) that specific revision has. If it's listed under "Unbekannte Konfigurationen" (Unknown configurations) you're out of luck :|

1-platter drives are generally faster (higher areal density) and cooler running.

[shovenose]

Re: My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

It's a few years old by now, but I bought it brand new and it doesn't have a lot of hours on it, and it was now extra, so I used it - no point in having a great hard drive gathering dust in the closet!

Oh and scenic, I know German so it's OK

[mariushm]

Re: My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

I don't know why you'd had to post a wiki link, when the specs are on WD's site, just a bit harder to find:

https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...92de3f1af1.pdf

They're 2 platter - 4 head design. They don't say explicitly but you can figure it out by looking at smaller drives in the series and the number of sectors on the smaller drives compared to newer ones.

[Scenic]

Re: My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

That pdf doesn't mention platters/heads anywhere. And it's not consistent per drive model either..

For example the 500GB WD5000AAKS has anything from three 167GB platters (early models) to a single 500GB one (late models) all under the same model number.

It's easy to look up, as the firm/hardware revision is always displayed after the main model (for example WD10EVDS-63N5B1).
Shows up everywhere where it shows the HDD model (device manager, HDTune, Everest/Aida64, ...)

I've contributed to that wiki myself.. (one last use for bad HDDs.. find out what's really inside lol)

[severach]

Re: My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

I switched my laptop from a 500GB 5400 WD to a 500GB 7200 WD Black. Substantially faster, especially because the electronics on the WD 5400 was defective and made the computer halt for several seconds on disk access every minute or so.

I warrantied the 5400 WD complaining that the performance was poor. They thought I didn't like the slow 5400 speed so they subbed the Black for the return. It was the constant pausing I didn't like but the extra speed is nice.

[momaka]

Re: My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

I never realized until today how slow 5400RPM laptop drives are!
In my bedside PC, I went from a 40GB 5400RPM 2.5" SATA drive to a 320GB 7200RPM 3.5" SAT (WD Caviar Blue)...
holy cow this shit is fast!

The RPM is not the only reason why your 7200 RPM drive is faster. The data density of the platters matters a lot too.
Let's imagine the drives had the same rotational speed and same number of platters. If the heads of both drives were reading a track (let's say 20 mm away from the center of the platter), since the 320 GB has much greater data density, a lot more data passes through any given point on the platter than the 40 GB drive.

[shovenose]

Re: My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

I switched my laptop from a 500GB 5400 WD to a 500GB 7200 WD Black. Substantially faster, especially because the electronics on the WD 5400 was defective and made the computer halt for several seconds on disk access every minute or so.

I warrantied the 5400 WD complaining that the performance was poor. They thought I didn't like the slow 5400 speed so they subbed the Black for the return. It was the constant pausing I didn't like but the extra speed is nice.

Nice one!
Do you know exactly what was wrong with the original WD?

[severach]

Re: My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

Nice one!
Do you know exactly what was wrong with the original WD?

No but I think it wasn't a media problem but an unlikely electronic problem that snuck by factory tests. I never seen a drive do that before. The drive only halted for about 5 seconds every minute or so. The drive never caused errors or failed so few would notice the fault. I find faults in a lot of computers by noticing that they are performing slightly under what they should. The drive was in a Compaq HP with the ill fated nVidia chip so I blamed the only likely suspect, the SATA chip on the motherboard. Then I transferred it into a Fujitsu E8110 with all Intel and the drive halted just as much.

[yyonline]

Re: My oh my WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

I switched my laptop from a 500GB 5400 WD to a 500GB 7200 WD Black. Substantially faster, especially because the electronics on the WD 5400 was defective and made the computer halt for several seconds on disk access every minute or so.

I warrantied the 5400 WD complaining that the performance was poor. They thought I didn't like the slow 5400 speed so they subbed the Black for the return. It was the constant pausing I didn't like but the extra speed is nice.

It's not a problem, it's a "feature"... Intellipark as WD calls it was first introduced in the Caviar Green desktop drives. It parks the heads after a ridiculously short period of inactivity. Then it started showing up in laptop drives. So far, I've only seen it in Caviar Blue drives larger than 320 GB. There is a wdidle3 utility that is sometimes successful in disabling the head parking. I've had it work for some drives, and fail to work for others. The aggressive head parking is more of a problem for some systems than for others. Some handle it flawlessly. Others freeze every time the drive wakes up.