It's your responsibility to research this on a per-model basis before making a purchase. Some models are prone to fail within 12 months, while others have average lifespans exceeding six years. Since HDDs have moving parts, wear and tear are expected over time-but not all HDDs wear at the same rate. As long as those speeds are within the SATA connector's max speed, which they most likely will be, you should be fine.įailure rate. Plus, most hard drives perform at similar levels these days, so don't worry too much about this particular detail.įor SSDs, look for sequential read and write speeds (also called sustained read and write speeds). While it's true that two 7200RPM drives could perform differently (e.g., one of them might be slower at re-positioning the disk reader), there's no standard way to compare access times. Traditional HDDs have a couple of other factors that impact performance, such as the time it takes for the reader to position itself to read data from or write data to the drive. Modern HDDs can have cache sizes ranging from 8MB to 256MB.Īccess times. When a hard disk needs to transfer data from one section of the drive to another, it utilizes a special area of embedded memory called the cache (or buffer).Ī larger cache enables the data to transfer faster because more information can be stored at one time.

However, a 7200RPM drive will always be faster than a 5400RPM drive.Ĭache space. No HDD can transfer data at that kind of speed. That first value is the SATA speed, which describes the theoretical maximum speed of a SATA connection. For example, a modern drive might be listed as 3.0GB/s and 7200RPM. Higher RPM means faster transfer of data to and from the drive. Transfer speeds. Many factors determine the performance of a consumer-grade HDD, but revolutions per minute (RPM) is an important one. SSDs can't hold as much space, and consumer-grade SSDs currently max out around 5-8TB per drive. HDDs come in a wide range of capacities, capping out at 18TB per drive due to physical limitations. Here's what to look for in a modern hard drive:

Hard Drive Specifications and Performance

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