According to Hitachi: The latest generation notebooks with 7200 RPM drives can now offer true desktop performance. With continued improvements in mobile disk drive designs, and the adoption of new technologies such as the femto slider, it is possible to improve the performance of the drive without sacrificing battery life.
Increasing the spindle speed to 7200 RPM, assuming BPI is held constant, will improve the data rate by 71% over 4200 RPM drives and 33% over 5400 RPM drives. Latency will be improved by 42% and 25% respectively.
About Power consumption Hitachi says:
A new technology that has been adopted in Hitachi’s 7200 RPM Travelstar drive that will assist in minimizing power usage is the femto slider technology. Current hard disk drives employ the pico slider. The Hitachi 7200 RPM Travelstar drive will be the first mobile product to adopt this latest technology.
The femto slider reduces linear dimensions of the pico slider by 30% and mass by 63%. As a result of this new technology, there is reduced power consumption and improved shock performance.
The improved power consumption as a result of the femto slider and other improvements translates to power metrics of the 7200 RPM platform that has power parity to the Travelstar 5400 RPM platform. This results in no increase in power consumption normally associated with increases in spindle RPM.
You can read more info here.
I still looking for more information about 7200 RPM HDD using more power than 5400 RPM but so far it seems to me that this could be just a myth.
Update: I just received a confirmation email, the 7200 RPM HDD at TabletKiosk customization page are from Hitachi. So, you wont see any extra power consumption if you change the default HDD by one of this!
As for battery life I tested them both with a looped hard drive defrag on Vopt and the battery life was just about 2 hours for both; within 5 minutes of each other. - Source.
ReplyDeleteFor users faced with the choice between a standard 4200-rpm hard drive and a faster 5400-rpm or even 7200-rpm model, we would recommend picking the faster-turning drive. Although the battery life will be a few minutes less, the performance increase more than outweighs this relatively small downside. The mere fact that a notebook boots up faster when equipped with a 5400-rpm drive justifies the higher price, in our opinion. - Source
ReplyDelete