How does RPM and cache affect the hard drive?

Question

if you have a 300GB hard drive with 7200 rpm and one with 10000 rpm does it make a difference. and if a hard drive has more cache is it better?

Answer 1

the 10000 rpm drive will be much faster when looking up information...and if it has more cache it is better because it can store more stuff temporarily

Answer 2

rpm is the speed @ which the drive spin this equals how fast the drive access your data, cache is like buffer or temp memory storage.

Answer 3

The fastest “enterprise” HDDs spin at 10,000 or 15,000 rpm, and can achieve sequential media transfer speeds above 1.6 Gbit/s and a sustained transfer rate up to 125MBytes/second. Drives running at 10,000 or 15,000 rpm use smaller platters because of air drag and therefore generally have lower capacity than the highest capacity desktop drives.

Gamers tend to get 10000 RPM Hard Drives for Gaming PCs due to the fast transfer rate substantially decreasing game load times (and startup times).

A cache is a block of memory for temporary storage of data likely to be used again. The CPU and hard drive frequently use a cache, as do web browsers and web servers.

BASICALLY, the higher the values for RPM and Cache, the better.

Answer 4

Dear User,

Why not the drive with 10K RPM will need less time to access data than a 7200 RPM drive. and when cache on the drive is bigger its performance will be faster than the one with less cache. Nowadays drives are available as SATA and it uses its cache with support for NCQ called Native Command Queuing and this command enables the system to carry out many task at the same time without deteriorating the system performance and 8MB or 16 MB cache in SATA Hard Drive is used for this purpose. Thanks