Q: How Slow is 5400 RPM?

Here are some real world test comparisons from "My MacBook Pro" web site.....

Benchmark tests of 5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM hard drives vary greatly.

The 21 inch screen iMacs are the only iMac models that use the laptop standard 5400 RPM drives.

If you are not doing any real taxing graphics or video work, then the 5400 RPM drive maybe just fine.

If you really want to future proof a new 21 inch screen iMac, then you may want to consider either the Fusion Drive which combines a Flash storage drive with the 5400 RPM hard drive OR bite the bullet and purchase that 21 inch screen with a full SSD (Solid State Flash storage drive).

If you decide to purchase a new iMac, get a Mac with the best specs that you can afford.

Good Luck!

After I got done smiling at your question I figured you may not know what RPM means. It is an acronym for:

Revolutions

Per

Minute

So 5400 RPM is 5400 revolutions per minute. In this case, it is referring to a hard drive inside a computer which uses a 5400 RPM HD's. You see the hard drive platters inside spin at 5400 RPM. Therefore a 7200 RPM HD would be faster, however if you want better performance get a Fusion drive which fuses (with software) a HD and a SSD. If you want the fastest performance get a SSD solution. Speed comes at a price though, the slower they are the cheaper they are. 

I had a Mini with a 5400 rpm drive once and sold it 6 weeks later at a loss because I could not stand the slowness. Everything I did was about 30+% slower than using a 7200 rpm drive. I'll never again have a 5400; if I cannot afford an SSD, a 7200 rpm will be the choice.

5400 vs. any other speed does not necessarily imply that a Mac will run faster or slower with either one. The rotational speed of a hard disk drive makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. The results shown in Mobile Blues's post illustrate that fact.

... the boot time is extremely slow ...

That is simply nonsense. If a minute or so is "extremely slow" to you, then don't purchase a computer at all. There is little or no need to routinely shut down a Mac anyway. Waking from sleep takes a couple of seconds, hard disk or not.

Having said that, there is no way I would consider a purchase of a new Mac with anything other than solid state (flash) memory. Traditional rotational hard disk drives pale in performance to flash memory.

My dissatisfaction with the 5400 drive was mostly doing video editing/rendering - it takes a very long time, but was even worse with the 5400. On the other hand, since I do a lot of that which then includes deleting very large files (100 - 150 GB) after my project is finished, I've decided to use a regular spinning drive rather than an SSD because of the excessive deleting going on. Am I correct in assuming that constantly deleting such large files is not the best for an SSD?

What kind of school work? Frankly, if it's mostly text based it makes no difference.

One thing to keep in mind is no matter what kind of drive you get in your iMac, you need an external drive to back it up. Using a computer with no back up is like skydiving without a parachute. It's fun until you reach the ground.

I am sitting in my lab typing on a 2011 MBA with 4GB and an SSD while next to me is a late 2013 iMac with 16GB and the above mentioned 5400 RPM drive. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the MBA starts up quicker and launches applications quicker due to the SSD. Loading and saving files is also unsurprisingly slower on the iMac. But what did shock and surprise me is how sluggish everything felt about the iMac. With just Mail, Safari, and Word running switching between applications gave me the beachball, at least momentarily. And this is a 16GB computer! In every way an older computer with less memory, a slower processor, and less powerful GPU beat the iMac. And yes, this was a clean machine untouched by any hands but mine with no malware or “cleaning” software.

Being a tech I have access to lots of toys so I put together an external USB 3 drive with an SSD and cloned the internal drive to it. Rebooting the computer with the external SSD provided no surprise: it was ready to use in 25 seconds. I launched the three programs mentioned above and they loaded in a flash and using the computer was a totally different experience with the SSD. I saw no beachballs, I was able to add several more applications to my work list without the computer slowing down or beach balling. Actually, none of this surprised me in the least, I had the same experience a year earlier with a Mac mini except in that case I installed the drive internally.

This is a long winded answer which could easily be shortened to this sentence: Do not buy an iMac or mini with a conventional spinning hard drive. Get the SSD upgrade, you won’t be disappointed.

dwb wrote:

 

Do not buy an iMac or mini with a conventional spinning hard drive. Get the SSD upgrade, you won’t be disappointed.

You do realize there is a large cost difference for the same capacity and that certainly would be a factor for a student. Should they not buy a computer at all if they can't afford an SSD with sufficient storage?

Babowa:

When I upgraded my Late 2008 MacBook I installed a 7200 rpm drive.  I reviewed others and decided I wanted a bit of a speed boost for frequent rewriting of largish files, and had read that this kind of thing wasn't the best thing for SSDs which are great for storing files which don't change much (e.g., operating systems).  I think that is the point behind fusion drives, or if you want to have two drives in a computer, one of each.  5400s run cooler and use less energy which is why they are/were popular in notebooks with limited battery life.  I can't understand putting one in an iMac unless you're trying to shave a bit off power demand to meet some industry specification.

I can't speak as to boot time with a 5400 drive. When I upgraded my MacBook I installed a 7200 rpm drive but I also put in 4x as much RAM (8GB).  I believe RAM gets tested as part of booting so test time probably canceled any increase in system file read speed and it still takes my MacBook about 50 seconds to boot to Mavericks.

From what I was reading I would say if you are using this for low level operations such as writing papers, spreadsheets, web browsing you probably would not notice the difference between a 7200 and 5400.  If you do video processing you probably would, particularly if you end up copying large files on and off the drive.

Limnos wrote:

 

I believe RAM gets tested as part of booting so test time probably canceled any increase in system file read speed and it still takes my MacBook about 50 seconds to boot to Mavericks.

I believe you are correct. Whenever I increase the RAM substantially in a Mac, the boot time increases. I'm not sure why anyone cares about boot times at all. It's the activity most computers do the least.

I don't read anything about supercomputers being chosen because one may boot faster.

Just to add, my Late 2015 5K fully tricked out iMac is slower to boot than my Commodore 64 was.

Even though flash memory is erase-cycle life limited, meaning it has a finite life, I'd still recommend it for any application that requires frequent mass storage access. When flash memory started to be deployed in common use (2007 or so, with the introduction of the iPhone) there were concerns about their finite life. Those concerns appear to have been unfounded. Also, remember most iPhones and iPads have very little RAM, meaning they rely upon virtual memory even for modest tasks. Given that well over a billion iPhones have been sold, plus billions of all its imitators, whatever that erase cycle limit equates to in "n" years is large.

Magnetic media is not so write/erase cycle limited, but their in-service life is finite for other reasons. Given equivalent applications there is no justification for believing a traditional rotating hard disk drive would last any longer than flash memory. A hard disk's additional failure modes imply they will never be as reliable or last as long as an equivalent SSD.

Fusion drives are a cost-sensitive compromise, whose life will be limited by the component that fails first. It's not a bad compromise, but completely eliminating the hard disk drive is preferable. They are the vacuum tubes of modern storage technology.

babowa wrote:

 

I had a Mini with a 5400 rpm drive once and sold it 6 weeks later at a loss because I could not stand the slowness. Everything I did was about 30+% slower than using a 7200 rpm drive. I'll never again have a 5400; if I cannot afford an SSD, a 7200 rpm will be the choice.

Strangely enough the difference between 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM is roughly 30% (the difference between 7200 RPM drives and an SSD is much greater, the SSD will be at least 500% faster)