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I just got a brand new Lenovo x230 with 7200 RPM hard drive. Now I understand SSD would've been better, but why hasn't 10k RPM become the standard by now?

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  • Can anyone comment about angular momentum? Does a platter spinning at 10K vs 7.2K present a whole new raft of stability issues?
    – Rich Homolka
    May 23, 2013 at 17:58
  • @Marin - Because SSD made them pointless. 10,000 RPM are normally smaller and cost more then 7200 RPM. The market wouldn't sustain them at higher volumes.
    – Ramhound
    May 23, 2013 at 19:25
  • I wouldn't blame it on SSDs alone though.
    – Marin
    May 23, 2013 at 19:32

2 Answers 2

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Found some reasons from a forum post;

quote 1

and another:

quote 2

Seem like good enough reasons!

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  • Yeah, noise is bad, and heat is bad, but at the end of the day, it was really all about price.
    – MDT Guy
    May 23, 2013 at 17:59
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    Useful information, but using a screenshot to get around the "no link farming" rule is lame. If you didn't want to take the time to paraphrase the text, you should have let somebody else answer the question.
    – Isaac Rabinovitch
    May 23, 2013 at 18:51
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    @MDTGuy having shared my cube with a circa '99 computer with a pair of 10k drives in it at one point it was the noise volume that was the killer. It could've been a free 10k computer vs $1k for a 7.2k one and after hearing the <strike>jet turbine</strike>10k drive I'd predict >99% of consumers would either open their wallet for the 7.2k one or decide they didn't need a computer afterall. Among other things, the 10k drives made a high end GPU with the fan stuck at 100% or the high speed 60mm Delta fan that was my overclocking pride and joy a dozen years ago seem quiet.
    – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight
    May 23, 2013 at 19:11
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10K and 15K drives are common in the SCSI/SAS hard disk (server) market, but as point #4 states - most users don't need much more performance considering the trade offs of drive noise and cooling. Most regular computer users are not going to notice if a file transfer is running at 60 MB/s or 120 MB/s - but people responsible for maintaining enterprise storage sure do. Every last MB/s you can squeeze out of a hard disk is required when you are talking about a large RAID array or a SAN. In addition to the speed, most server rooms have large cooling systems that cover the entire data center, so cooling and/or noise are not a big issue. If you have ever been in a data center, most of the background noise is coming from the cooling system anyways.

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  • If I could you would get a +2 for the ", most of the background noise is coming from the cooling system anyways. "
    – Hennes
    Sep 11, 2013 at 16:20

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