5400 Vs 7200 RPM IDE Drives

[kidzer]

Does having a 5400 RPM drive have a significant affect on boot time and general resposiveness of a computer?

I ask beacuse I used to just have an 80Gb 7200RPM drive but I got hold of a 40Gb one and have been using it as a boot drive - not realising that it was a 5400RPM drive, and have noticed that no matter what Windows seems to take forever to load compared to a few months ago.

Cheers,
David

[herulach]

yep, definately. ALthough if its in a laptop your battery life will go up quite a bit

[kidzer]

Nah, its a desktop machine.

I assume its reduced seek times that make it slower then?

Now gotta look for a way to move the 40Gb Drive stuff onto the 80Gb Drive while keeping all the data on both intact...

[BenW]

Look on the rear of the drive, it has some jumpers that say 'master', 'slave', 'Cable Select'

The IDE cable has 2 connectors. Add the boot drive to the connector furthest away from the motherboard (Other end of cable) and set it as master. Then put the other drive on the middle connector and set it as 'slave'

I did the swap from 5400 to 7200, theres certainly an improvement but its not massive. I found that level loading times on farcry seemed to be unaffected

[Zak33]

5400 to 7200 was a huge speed increase for PC boot and load times.

Going backwards would be dire

10,000 rev hard drives are noticeabley faster again

[kidzer]

Aye, dire about describes it.

BenW - the master and slave assignements are already set correctly - I was after a way to mirror C: (5400) onto a 2nd partition on the 7200 RPM drive while keeping all the stuff on the 2nd drive intact and working (with regards to registry entries and stuff - would just mirroring C: onto another partition on the other drive work?)

[xolotl]

As has already been said 5,400rpm drives are considerably slower than 7,200 ones. As well as higher seek times they also have slower data transfer rates.

Same difference as between a normal 7,200rpm and a Raptor. Only the other way round.