5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm

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Member Since: Mar 16, 2011

Ok .... Im new here and totally confused.. Everyone says to use a 7200 rpm hard drive... Then Ive heard if im buying a i5 with 4 gigs of ram expand. to 8 gig that is more then enough. I will be using about 8 tracks , usb with 2-3 tracks of sample tanks to create backing tracks to gig with. Now I know that everyone says buy the best you can afford at this point.. But some say that years ago 5400 rpm was slow but today 5400 is much faster on the faster laptops? will 5400 rpm realy hurt me that much... I cant find a i5 with 7200rpm especially in the 650 range.

thanks in advance,

joepym

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Administrator
Since: Apr 03, 2002


Mar 16, 2011 08:48 am

Ummmmmm, hmmmmmm, I'm confused, 5400 rpm is 5400 "revolutions per minute". I am confused as to how 5400 RPM's could be slower or faster...it's a revolution per minute reading and not subject to other interpretation...faster would be 5401 RPM, slower would be 5399 RPM...the disk moves as fast as the disk moves.

Member
Since: Mar 16, 2011


Mar 16, 2011 09:00 am

Your right... I suppose I posted that wrong.... with the faster laptops today I guess they were telling me that the pc isnt as taxed. With more ram the pc dosnt have to go to cache as much giving and overall better preformance then laptops of a few years ago. Im not that tech savy but that would seem to make sense to me. I didnt seem to have any problems runing a single core 1.8 hrtz with usb.... but I didnt run 2-3 sampletank tracks... will that make that much of a preformance difference?

thanks for your comment,

joeypm

Administrator
Since: Apr 03, 2002


Mar 16, 2011 09:17 am

Oh, yes, running multiple instances of sampletank or any ram heavy sampler can be a problem...disk speed would be less critical (me thinks) than ram amount and CPU speed...max 'em both out.

7200 RPM will be better over the long haul, however.

http://www.unitedmusicians.info
Contributor
Since: Nov 11, 2007


Mar 16, 2011 01:40 pm

When I upgraded my recording notebook's hard drive I used a solid state hard drive instead of a 7200 RPM drive. You'll get better performance out of the solid state drive, but the cost of hard drive space is much more expensive. You'll definitely want to have external storage if you go with the faster solid state drive. I bought an Intel X-25M (80GB) solid state hard drive and bought a 2.5" HDD enclosure for the 250 GB hardrive that was originally installed in my computer. You don't need an entire external hard drive, just the 2.5" enclosure to put your old hard drive into, keeping your upgrade cost below $250. The solid state upgrade was worth it for me! My Macbook Pro loads completely in 11 seconds. I have a project with 96 tracks in ProTools right now, and I don't have any latency issues from the high track count.

Hold 'Em Czar
Member
Since: Dec 30, 2004


Mar 18, 2011 02:15 am

RUN AWAY FROM 5400!!!

that's all i gotta say about that.

Administrator
Since: Apr 03, 2002


Mar 18, 2011 06:59 am

Whaddya really think?

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