Nowadays, you can find hard drives spinning up to 15000 RPM but still, the most popular choices for desktops and laptops are between 5400 and 7200 RPM. And yes, many would prefer SSDs, but HDDs still come with many benefits and today’s topic is their rotation speed.
Rotation Speed (RPM) Explained A Hard drive is mainly composed of platters, read-write heads, and a motor spindle. All of the platters are mounted on the motor spindle in parallel and each storage surface of the platters is equipped with a magnetic head.
The magnetic heads move along the platters' radial direction, making several thousand revolutions per minute (RPM) so that the heads can be positioned at a specified position on the platter for reading and writing data. In other words, the RPM is the maximum number of revolutions that the platters can complete in one minute.
5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM Typically, the higher the RPM, the faster the hard disk is, meaning that in terms of rotation speed, 7200 RPM should be at least 15% faster than 5400 HDDs. However, it’s important to acknowledge that these are just theoretical numbers and the actual hard drive speed is also affected by many other factors.