Does it matter if I use 7200 or 5900 RPM drives?

I was using 5900 just to keep the heat down but will a 7200 produce that much more heat?

 

I have been finding that most of my hard drives that are dying are WD drives. The Seagate drives seem to be better.

Since most Seagate drives are 7200RPM I was thinking just to use the Seagates from now on.

 

Has anyone else noticed this?

 

  It seems to change at generation/rev levels of drives.  But if all else were equal, the higher RPM will generate more heat.  If you have good air flow, it will not matter though.  I am more concerned about the bearing life on the higher RPM drives.  From my tests, higher RPM drives tend to fail on bearing failures sooner than lower RPM drives.  But I am talking about many years of operational use, so it may not be a concern for most users, that tend to upgrade from older and smaller drives far before a bearing failure is likely to show up under any well ventilated operational conditions.

 

  As far a WD drive failures, are you talking about actual DATA failures, or SMART failure messages related to high Load_Cycle_Count errors?  I have a few that I have either gotten from other people, or bught myself, that have this error, since they had not had the idle timer disabled before the count racked WAY up there!

 

  None of my WD drives that have a high Load_Cycle_Count, have 'YET' to show other errors, though I am concerned about the high mechanical stress that has alreay occured, and look very closely at the smart data on those drives, logging it regularly for changes and shifts.

 

  As far as DATA errors, and reallocated sectors go, I have had far more issues with my Seagate drives than my WD drives.  Of course, that will vary with any sampling group, but that has been what I have seen so far.

 

 

It's a simple trade-off of performance vs. reliability.

 

Higher rpm drives have both faster seek times and faster data transfer rates;  but use a bit more power and generate more heat than their lower-rpm cousins.

 

There's a reason both WD and Seagate spin their "NAS" units at slower speeds.    They both, of course, have "Enterprise" class units that spin at 7200rpm, and have higher-quality bearings and better internal heat management ... but you definitely pay for that privilege 

 

FWIW I use almost exclusively 5400/5900 rpm drives in my two UnRAID servers ... I DO have a few older 1.5TB Seagates that are 7200 rpm units in my original server, and they work fine, but are ALWAYS the warmest drives in the array.