Standard-use 3.5" hard disk drives for non-enterprise use generally include spin rates that include all except the following

Standard-use 3.5" hard disk drives for non-enterprise use generally include spin rates that include all except the following

• 10,000 RPM (10k)
• 5400 RPM (5.4k)
• 15,000 RPM (15k)
• 7200 RPM (7.2k) 

EXPLANATION

RPM specification, platters need to spin faster to increase performance in a hard drive. This results in moving the data bits past the read/write head faster, which results in higher data rates. Hard drives have been engineered with spin rates as low as 1,200 RPM and as high as 15K RPM. But today’s most common RPM rates, in both laptop and desktop PCs, are between 5,400 and 7,200 RPM.

Given two identically designed hard drives with the same areal densities, a 7,200 RPM drive will deliver data about 33% faster than the 5,400 RPM drive. Consequently, this specification is important when evaluating the expected performance of a hard drive or when comparing different HDD models.