Conclusion
At a time when environmental factors are becoming more and more important, the new lease of life for the 5400 rpm is not a surprise. As we saw during the different tests, they do allow you to reduce energy consumption significantly, as well as temperture and noise levels while maintaining pretty good performance levels.
Of course the 7200 rpm drives are still a bit more responsive when functioning as a system drive, although not as good as SSDs which however have low capacity: combining an SSD with a 5400 rpm within the same machine would seem to give the ideal high performance but quiet solution. These 5400 rpms will also have a place within a PCHC or an NAS.
Our preference is for Samsung’s EcoGreen over Western Digital’s Caviar Green, as it has lower sound levels and better write performance. The Caviar Greens do nevertheless have the advantage for simultaneous access, which might be an advantage in a shared NAS. For pure storage, the 32 MB version has nothing on the 16 MB version, and there is really no advantage unless you’re going to use the Caviar Green as the system disk.
As for the 7200 rpm models, the 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black outperforms the Samsung SpinPoint F1 overall. However it heats up and is noisier, which means many will reject it out of hand.
To finish with, we do wish to say that there will no doubt be a lot of new 5400 rpm models this year, with platter density going from 333 to 500 GB, whether Western or Samsung. This ought to make the 5400 rpm solution worth an even closer look!
