HDD RPM speeds

[Khamsin]

How much of a difference can you tell between 7200 RPM and 5400 RPM?

In what situations would you notice the difference?

In case it matters, it would be a RAID 0 array.

[Blubbartron]

If your current 7200 RPM HD is not running in a RAID setup, the 5400's in RAID will perform better, minus the fact that if one gets fucked, you lose everything. In terms of gaming, you should notice your load times go way down. Approximately 30% down, depending on the average seek time of the lower speed drives, and whether or not they can transfer at the same speed as the 7200. Outside of gaming, you generally aren't reading from or writing to the HD in large enough quantities that the bottleneck isn't on some other device, like your DVD drive or flash stick or what have you.

[levish]

Depends on the drive itself, I can't see why you would choose a 5400 rpm drive for a desktop though. Rule of thumb is that they are 20-30% slower in access times and throughput and probably more than 30% slower in IOPs but again it depends on the drive.

You'd notice it mostly at boot up and loading applications unless you run enterprise applications which you shouldn't on either and instead be looking at SAS 10,000 or 15,000 rpm drives

[Khamsin]

Well, the context is, Dell is sending me a new laptop to replace the one that's been giving me so much trouble. It's slightly upgraded in a few minor ways, and one of those ways being dual 250GB HDDs instead of dual 200GB HDDs like I have now.

The ones I have now I chose because they were 7200RPM versus the 5400RPM ones they had available at the time I ordered the laptop. I can't tell if the 250GB ones they put in my new laptop are 7200 or 5400, so I was just seeing if its worth making a fuss about since it's still "in production" until the 18th.

Speaking of which, is there a way to tell what RPM your HDDs are? There's nothing about it in Device Manager, is it listed during POST? Or in the RAID configuration manager? Or do I just have to ask Dell what they put in it?

[Ratatapa]

Sisoft Sandra will give you the info bout your HDD

BenchmarkHQ

Havnt seen it in CPU-Z