If your filling up your Playstation 3’s hard drive and looking for more space, you might consider getting a faster hard drive at the same time. The standard hard drive seen in PS3’s has a rotations per minute speed of 5400, you might want to look at a 7200rpm.
Ok, so lets take a look and compare the speeds and temperatures of the 5400rpm against 7200rpm. The following are system speeds – not in game.
PS3 startup time
- 5400rpm: 15.7 seconds
- 7200rpm: 13.5 seconds
Game background load time
- 5400rpm: 1.9 seconds
- 7200rpm: 1.9 seconds
Now, lets take a look at the temperatures for each drive in different conditions.
Idle
- 5400rpm – 111 degrees / 43.9c
- 7200rpm – 116 degrees / 46.6c
Stress test (ran some games and folding at home)
- 5400rpm – 129 degrees or 53.9c
- 7200rpm – 131 degrees or 55.0c
Below are install times for the following games.
Grand Turismo HD
- 5400rpm – 1:42.636
- 7200rpm – 1:32.993
About 10% increase in speed.
Jericho demo
- 5400rpm – 2:08.629
- 7200rpm – 1:58.685
About 8% increase in speed.
Tony Hawk demo
- 5400rpm – 4:11.184
- 7200rpm – 3:32.045
About 16% increase in speed.
DIRT Demo
- 5400rpm – 1:29.289
- 7200rpm – 1:25.385
About 5% increase in speed.
Special thanks goes to hotpocketdeath over at the Playstation Forums.
To be honest, i wouldn’t bother getting a faster drive, i would stick with a 5400rpm and get an even bigger drive. Its not worth the minus extra few seconds and more temperature.
Another thing is that upgrading your hard drive does not void your warranty. If i was to ever upgrade, i will be sticking with a 5400rpm drive to be on the safe side.
16 Responses to “ 7200rpm vs 5400rpm hard drive ”
When I was looking to upgrade my PS3 a few months back, I saw this same info on a website.
I decided that the speed increase of just a couple of seconds (for ‘everyday’ use – i.e. playing games, not installing them) was negligible enough to be irrelevant. Partnered with the extra heat generated by the faster drive, and the extra wear and tear that would place on the fan by causing it to step up much sooner, I decided to go with a 5400rpm 320GB Western Digital drive.
The hardest thing about actually upgrading the drive is that the screws holding it in the caddy are usually over-tightened and a real pain to remove. The heads on mine stripped in seconds, but a pair of long-nosed pliers soon got them out. I replaced them with the screws which came with the enclosure I bought for the old 60GB drive.
while the install time gains (or losses) aren’t really drastic enough to warrant it, are there any benefits in the vein of load times for games that use hard drive installs or for PSN downloaded games? I’d love to see the numbers on that, as the temp gains seem pretty minimal, especially if you keep your ps3 well ventilated….
Generally speaking, it’s seek times and data transfer rates that matter. You can get both 7200rpm and 5400rpm drives that transfer data at 300MBps. The larger the file, the more seeking occurs, which is why the faster spinning drives (having lower seek times) notch up noticeably shorter times on the longer operations, such as installing games.
For everyday use in a PS3 (loading PSN or ‘installed’ games), I doubt you’re likely to get a noticeable decrease in load times of more than 2 or 3 seconds. Whether or not that can be considered worthwhile is down to the individual.
anyone know if the faster seek times on 7200rpm drives improve streaming ie. texture pop in in games like UT3
What’s the cache on the 7200 HDD?
16MB Cache.
why not by a western digital of 10,000 RPM ??… that would do it… and you’d notice the difference… or is it not compatible??
I had the same problem with the screws when replacing my hdd. u can use compressed air from the duster cans to make the screws not be so soft since it freezes stuff. I too go the WD 320gb hdd and I have had no problems. I do notice that my fan tends to kick in a little more than before so I could imagine using a 7200rpm would make it a little worse. for the ps3 i think 5400rpm should be fine. and the 10,000rpms are way expensive and u cant get the same storage space as u can with a 5400 or 7200. check newegg.com
I’d like to see the numbers of a ‘downgrade’ to a 4200rpm drive. Perhaps the times achieved are not much worse than those of the stock drive, but temperature (and fan kick in) could get much better. Don’t know. Please.
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Does anyone know if Sony has sorted out it’s max partition size problem on the PS3? Where it can’t recognise anything over around 200gb for the internal hard drive. Last time I upgraded my hard drive to a 250gb 5400rpm drive it only recognised 205gb of space.
Just for everybody to know. It is not anymore possible to upgrade your hard disk with a new one if you are running 40gb ps3 -version with the latest 2.41 firmware.
@ Mark B – I upgraded mine to 320GB and it seems to recognise it fine. If I go to System Information, it reports that I have 238GB of 298GB free.
Apart from the space used by the system, I have a number of games installed – EG:WT, GT5P, MGS4, etc. So any issue there may have been appears to be sorted now.
@ Huppe
Yes you can upgrade your hard drive with any firmware installed, and with any ps3
@ Talk Playstation
Thanks!
hey, what about an SSD Hard disk? They are really fast and they will be still cool in action. Negative: they re really expensiv.
Could you take the “lowest” SSD Hard disk for the main system HD and then put a second HD via USB for games,sound ,… ?
thanks for awnsers