How does the RPM affect the speed of a hard drive?

Answer 1

If you've ever tried to open or save a document to/from a floppy disk, you'll know that floppy disks were slow. Imagine if that was your hard disk. Your hard disk contains your applications, user data, operating system - everything that is meant to be retained when the PC is switched off. The faster the hard disk, the faster data can be loaded and saved. Therefore, if you get a HD with a larger cache or RPM speed (10,000 over 7,200), game data will load off disk faster, applications will be able to read system data faster, and your PC will go somewhat more speedily. A faster hard disk isn't a replacement for a spacious amount of RAM, however.

Answer 2

RPM stands for Revolutions Per Minute. It is the speed that the disk inside spins. RPM's is one of the many factors influencing how quickly your hard drive can access or write information, you should look for the information on the box of your computer it should tell you how quickly your harddrive can access and write.

Answer 3

RPM or Revolutions Per Minute for a hard disk drive of a computer is speed at which the spindle which holds the disk platters revolves. Although there are many parameters affecting performance, faster RPM allows for higher data throughput and performance to the drive. As disk revolution speed increases, the internal data transfer rate (data transfer rate when reading or writing data) increases. Most common drives these days have 7200RPM speed.

Answer 4

Revolution per minute is a measurement of how fast the drive platters rotate. Usually a faster rotation means faster access and read/write speeds.

However most users would not notice the difference between a 5400 rpm drive and a 7200 rpm drive. The 10000 rpm drive is usually reserved for high end gaming.