Seagate 2TB 5900 rpm Hard Drive

I noticed some of the larger capacity seagate drives that have been going on sale at places like Fry's lately have been 5900 rpm instead of 7200 rpm. I picked up my 2TB back on black friday for around $130 and just got around to installing it last night. So I ran some benchmarks to see how much of a performance hit there was when compared to a seagate .11 1.5TB 7200 rpm drive.

First the 5900 rpm drive (win 7 x64):



7200 rpm:



There are some odd dips in the 5900 hdtach graph. It might be because I had simplify media and air video services running which scans that drive. Hopefully it's not a sign of a bad drive.

So yeah there is a pretty significant hit in throughput dropping down to 5900 rpm. It should be fine for storing large amounts of media (which is what I plan to use it for) but I wouldn't want to use one as a boot drive. Also, the newegg reviews seem to indicate a pretty high failure rate. Here's hoping I got a good one.