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How Important is RPM for Hard Drives

Looking to purchase another 2tb SATA drive for music storage. I'm seeing 7200 rpm drives that are maybe a bit noisier and run a bit warmer than 5400 rpm drives that are cooler but slower. The 7200 drive (Hitachi) may be a tad more reliable than the 5400 Western Digital or Seagate - not sure. I do plenty of backup anyway.

Thing is, with over 1.5 Tb of music, I imagine seek times can be somewhat slow. Once a music file is found, there ae no skips or pauses with itunes. Does the rotation speed matter much for seek times on such a large music library, or is the rpm more an issue for writing/reading higher bandwidth information than music?

Thanks, Peter
peter_s
classicjazz
153 posts
 
I wouldn't fill a hard drive more than 70 percent; the performance comes to a crawl as it fills up. The spin rate will help during the initial transfer to some extent - if you are copying data from another hard drive. If you are loading new discs, the CD-ROM is the bottleneck, not the hard drive. I would get two green drives and run them as a striped RAID for faster transfer rates (which will help speed data transfer to your backup, which I recommend).

Another option is the Drobo device, which is like a RAID but tolerates drive failures with less user headache than a RAID.

If you are paranoid, buy Enterprise class drives with the 5 year warranty. The price difference may be worth the piece of mind, especially if you've invested time and hassle of ripping your own CDs. I ripped about 250 discs onto my HD and it was tedious and I have still to fix all the metadata. I don't want to duplicate my efforts and would rather lay out for the data redundancy.
peter_s OP
1,348 posts
 
I am mostly investing in cheap 2tb drives and making sure I have several redundent backups. I had a RAID drive but it was super noisy and the disks didn't stop spinning when my computer slept. Perhaps a better RAID drive would help. I'm basically buying naked SATA drives and putting them in existing enclosures.
mlsstl
1,451 posts
 
I recently replaced a WD "Green" 1.5 TB drive (essentially 5400 RPM) in my music server with a 1.5 TB 7200 RPM Seagate.

There is no difference in music playback, nor in selecting music to play.

The only difference I've found is the 7200 RPM drive backs up much faster and it is also faster if one re-indexes the library. (A Squeezeboxserver wipe & rescan is about 75 minutes on the 7200 RPM versus over 2 hours on the 5400 RPM drive.)

Both of the latter items are only maintenance issues done in the background and do not interfere with the playback. My music server is in a different room so drive noise is not an issue.
nickjn
111 posts
 
The higher the RPM on a hard drive, the faster the data will be accessed...but the faster the hdd, the hotter it is.
You'll need some cooling for it. :)

If you have a 5400 or 7200 rpm hdd, it wont affect music playback.
peter_s OP
1,348 posts
 
Thanks. Got the 5400 green drive. I don't mind waiting longer for the backup to occur!
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