Computer manufacturers are letting us down. Computers are being sold with specs that appear to be perfectly fine, but buried in the small print is a detail that means they are deliberately hobbled. They will disappoint you from the first day they’re turned on. Beware of the 5400 RPM hard drive!
All new computers should be shipping with solid state drives (SSDs). Solid state drives have no moving parts. There is a startling difference in performance between a computer with an SSD and a computer with a traditional spinning hard drive. If you get a solid state drive, a new computer will work the way you expect it to. Click on a program and the program starts. Switch between programs and the programs run at full speed without noticeable delays.
Solid state drives are turning up more often but manufacturers are still shipping computers with conventional spinning hard drives for two reasons:
• You are very fortunate if you can afford a fancy new premium business laptop. Most people are looking for the cheapest PC they can find. Instead of helping buyers make smart decisions, manufacturers compete for the bottom of the market by putting in the cheapest possible components whenever possible, even if that guarantees a poor experience. It’s been going on for years. Manufacturers were partially responsible for the death of Windows Vista almost ten years ago when they knowingly put out underpowered hardware that could not run Vista well.
• Most people focus on big numbers. It’s hard to blame them. Computers are complicated. Spinning hard drives are cheaper and able to hold more data, so cheap computers typically boast 1Tb or 2Tb of storage space. It’s not obvious that those big drives are cheap and slow. Solid state drives are typically 256Gb or 512Gb. People see those numbers and think the computer with four times as much hard drive space must be better.
It’s not reasonable to expect non-technical people to understand the details of how hard drives are built. I wish manufacturers would do the right thing and start installing SSDs across the board, but they won’t. There’s still a pretty significant price difference per gigabyte between SSDs and spinning drives; we’ll still see big spinning drives in cheap computers for a few years more.
But there’s one more important detail and it’s kind of unforgiveable.
Spinning hard drives spin at two different speeds, 7200 RPM and 5400 RPM. There is a noticeable difference in performance between the two, when the drives are running the operating system and opening programs.
If you get a new computer with a 7200 RPM hard drive and click on a program, the program . . . will . . . start. Hey, it’s not awful. You’ll get your work done. You can drive a Prius up a freeway entrance ramp and you’ll get to full speed eventually, right?
But if your new computer has a 5400 RPM hard drive . . . well, picture a golf cart going up that freeway onramp. It will get to the freeway. Eventually. It will get to the destination. Eventually. No one involved is going to enjoy the experience.
You will likely only find these slow drives on the cheapest Windows computers, like the Lenovo Ideapad 310 in the above screenshot (starting price $549).
I noticed this when I was researching all-in-one PCs, where the monitor on the desk holds the innards so there is no separate tower on the floor and a minimum of cables. All-in-ones are a tempting choice. At one time they were prone to overheating and it was frustrating that they couldn’t be opened up to change the internals – add memory or swap out the video card or the like. Now we rarely change anything inside a PC and heating issues are far less common. It’s tempting to get an all-in-one and remove cable clutter.
Too many all-in-ones are built with fine components, except for the slow hard drive. The Dell Inspiron 24 3000, for example, can be purchased with an Intel Core i5 processor and 8Gb of RAM and a touchscreen for $799, but performance will be miserable with the 5400 RPM hard drive. Dell does not offer an SSD or faster drive as an option.
This even turns up at the high end. Microsoft introduced the Surface Studio in November. It’s a very expensive all-in-one aimed at creative professionals, with a gorgeous 28” display on a unique mount that allows it to be lowered almost flat for drawing on the touchscreen like a drafting table. Its elegant, minimalist lines appeal to architects and artists who can pay top dollar for the best tools. Surface Studio is the kind of computer that Apple would have designed a few years ago. It was quite striking that Microsoft introduced a beautiful aspirational computer literally one day before Apple’s lackluster introduction of revamped MacBook Pro laptops that excite no one.
The cheapest Surface Studio is three thousand dollars. For three thousand dollars, you get an amazing ultra-high resolution display, an innovative mount, almost the latest Intel processor and Nvidia video card, and . . . a 5400 RPM spinning hard drive. That’s a little misleading because Microsoft pairs it with a small solid state drive running the operating system, so performance is not impacted as much as low-end computers that don’t get that boost. But it slows performance in a way that is noticeable to power users and that has no place in a three thousand dollar computer. Leo LaPorte, host of wonderful TWiT netcasts from Petaluma, tore down his Surface Studio and replaced the hard drive with an SSD. Here’s an excerpt from the show where he describes his reaction to the slow drive and shows how the difficult teardown was done. The result was a 400% improvement in read/write speeds. It makes no sense for the Surface Studio to ship with the slow drive.
Take a look at the hard drive when you buy your next computer. Always get a solid state drive if the budget allows. And don’t get a computer with a 5400 RPM drive even if you’re shopping for an inexpensive machine. Life is too short to get a computer that will make you sad.
Completely agree with everything in this blog….and it’s still relevant to this day. As a small IT business owner, with 24 years of experience, I have to say that OEMs installing 5400 rpm drives are still keeping me busy with with upgrade work. It’s actually worth noting, the time gap between when a customer purchases a new system, and when it finally bogs down to the point they can’t take it anymore, is closing at a faster rate. Meaning many of the laptops, desktops, and convertibles that I upgrade are less than 2 years old now….whereas 10-15 years ago the system would have been 4-6 years old. While OEMs should NOT be installing these slow hard drives into the systems they sell, it does give us techs an opportunity to make an income on the poor decision the consumer made by ‘cheaping out’ and not purchasing a unit with an SSD. 🙂
I know I’m commenting on an “old article”, but it’s still relevant. 5400 RPM drives these days should not be used as a boot drive any longer, nothing will justify it. Nevertheless, these drives indeed do have a use, as mass storage space. For example, I need to record multi-track live music (about 20 microphones) for hours and days on end on a laptop. I have the OS (Linux) on a 120 GB SSD, and have a second 2.5″ drive, 5 Terabyte and 5400 RPM hard drive for recording the WAV’s . The drive is being written sequentially, so it’s fast enough. It’s only 5400 RPM so it’s quiet and not running hot. So these drives can be useful, if deployed in the right way. As a boot drive is not the right way…
Regarding the speed of old computers, it should be mentioned that accumulated dust is a speed killer too. Processors measure their own temperature, and run slower when they are too hot. Dust that got stuck on the cooling ribs and fan work as an insulator, preventing efficient cooling. So the motherboard sees the CPU is too hot and runs the fan at full speed, but the CPU thinks “hey, I’m still too hot, I’ll run as slow as needed to cool down.” Your OS doesn’t tell you. Your hardware doesn’t tell you. M$ and the hardware manufacturers try to convince you that it’s time to buy a new computer. Dust is their best friend and perfect ally.
The solution is to blow some air from a compressor (or compressed air can) into the ventilation openings, or better, to remove the (bottom) lid and blow everywhere (not too big pressure, but enough to remove dust). The inside will look like new, but more importantly, your laptop or desktop will run much faster again. This is really one of those “secrets no computer manufacturer wants you to know”…
Along with installing an SSD, of course, but most people know that one by now.
I googled 400-ARIR: 1TB 5400rpm Hard Drive and this was the 1st article that came up.
I wish someone told me about this 2 years ago when I fell for this Dell inspiron 15 3000 laptop. Intel Core i3, 1TB hard drive, 8gb RAM. Back then I did not know it was a spinning drive. Spend months and months to figure out what the heck is wrong with this laptop even when there the hard drive space was empty with not more than 4GB data in it. HIGHLY FRUSTRATING EXPERIENCE DURING START – UP, OPENING MULTIPLE TABS, SWITCHING BETWEEN TABS, STARTING ANY PROGRAM FROM WINDOWS MENU ETC! ***K feels cheated man. I searched youtube for tons of solutions and followed all the steps that people recommend to change/update in the various settings of a Dell laptop. NOTHING HAPPENED! Even a simple MS WORD OR MS EXCEL document took ages to open as if this was a 90s laptop or something.
After 1.5 years, I came across someone who checked my laptop and said hey this one has got a disc in it. He asked me – MIGHT BE SLOW RIGHT?? I was like YES!!! and then he gave me the solution to change the hard drive and that is when I came to know about the Spinning drive vs SSD speed difference. About to purchase a 250 or 512 GB SSD to replace the current 1TB 5400 rpm drive.
Anyways hope more and more people come across your article like I did. Good job!
If you haven’t gotten the SSD yet, you’ve got a treat ahead of you – it will feel like you bought a rocket ship after living with the slow drive for so long. Good luck!
I bought a 200 dollar Lenovo S145 idea pad. I thought I was getting a deal. 500 gb he 4gb ram 15.6 in. And it is not an ugly computer. Didn’t take long to realize. I had a 5400 rpm hd. I’m a multitasker I do a hundred things at once. That hd barely let me do one. So I read online. Someone said great computer to upgrade. So I thought why not. I bought a 500 GB SSD for 64 dollars. And cloned it. The moment it went in I noticed a difference. Apps open online doesn’t suck. I can multitask. So for 264 dollars I fell like I have a 400-500 dollar computer. Ssd isn’t expensive anymore. If ur computer sucks upgrade. Don’t be afraid of bad hard drives. Buy ssd. You will find every penny was worth it.
Very nice! You’ll notice a significant difference if you can upgrade the RAM – 8Gb is the minimum sweet spot for Windows 10 – and memory is cheap now, too.
We won’t see the end for conventional platter HDDs for one main reason, storage capacity. It’s really that simple. It’s not just the price per gigabyte, but the sheer volume of storage a platter can condense on a microscropic scale compared to NANDs in series, and having to fabricate the intricate, even smaller-than-microscropic circuitry.
I still have two desktop PC’s that have Haswell CPU’s and they have Seagate 7200 RPM hard drives. I have no issues with their performance and its really too bad PC makers compromise on hard drives in terms of platter speed. Honestly 5400 RPM drives just makes a otherwise well spec’d laptop perform badly for a end user and its very noticeable. When people start complaining about their PC being slow, the first thing to do is find out what is the main storage drive specs. These days I think your better off with a smaller capacity SSD drive and use a external spin drive for archive storage where speed isn’t so important. You definitely want your OS to boot up with a SSD drive.
Yep. I’m a sucker. Bought a customized HP Envy in 2015 with the optional 256 GB SSD and a 1 TB 5400 HDD. IT SUCKS! I’m thankful for the SSD, but it is too small to handle all my needs. I would have gladly paid more had HP offered a nice SSD upgrade option, but they did not. Sadly, I was just on their website today and saw that the bulk of their computers are still made the same way! What the hell?
I put in an SSD into my old laptop, and the difference is night and day!
I was sorta hoping for some facts to back up your claims. While your assertion is true that 7200RPM drives are faster than 5400RPM drives, I was looking for data that would suggest how much faster, and whether that made any difference given a particular motherboard, processor, and so on.
One good example of what I mean is, I run nearly all my data across a LAN from a Linux server. The data drives on the server are 5400RPM. The reason? Well, I’m already transferring data at nearly the theoretical limit of the LAN as it is. If I bought 7200RPM drives, it wouldn’t go any faster because the network won’t run any faster.
On the other hand, I suppose I’m answering my own questions as I think through this comment. On my desktop, I have two SSDs and one spinning 5400 drive. The SSDs just scream in terms of boot time and loading, so it would follow that if I substituted a faster spinning drive for the slow one, the computer would be able to keep up.
Still, I would have like to know how much faster a 7200 RPM drive would be compared to a 5400 RPM drive, on average.
I don’t have a hardware bench. I wonder if someplace like Anand or Tom’s has measured that? But you’re right, I was primarily writing about boot drives and the drives where programs are installed. It’s less important, maybe even unnecessary, for data drives, even on the same machine. So I’ve got movies and photos and PDFs on a secondary drive and on a NAS and I bet the performance wouldn’t be noticeably different if I switched between 5400 and 7200.
But for the boot drive on a Windows machine, it makes the difference between a slow-but-acceptable PC and a my-god-I-wish-I-was-dead PC.
I built a new pc . It has two hdd ,one new 7200rpm 2gb and one 5400rpm 500gb old hdd
Os and programs are installed in new hdd
Old hdd used to store only movies songs files etc
But the pc tends to takr more time to load files in new drive
Does the old hdd causes this
Without old hdd it was more faster
Please tell