Hard disk: revolutions per minute - easily explained

How fast a hard drive stores or retrieves data depends, among other things, on the revolutions per minute. We will explain what exactly is behind it.

Hard drive speed: 5400 vs. 7200 revolutions per minute

In addition to access time and intermediate storage, the revolutions per minute are an elementary criterion for the speed of a hard disk. The more revolutions per minute, the faster the hard drive can work.

• On the right in the picture you can see a common HDD hard drive. In the middle you see the memory, visually it resembles a CD. The read and write head is located on the memory.
• The read and write head can move back and forth on the hard disk in order to call up the individual data at the right places.
• There is a magnetic disc under the read and write head. The faster the magnetic disk rotates, the faster the hard disk can read and write the data.
• The magnetic disks in most hard drives are currently rotating at 7200 revolutions per minute. Often only 5400 revolutions are used in laptops. However, there are already models with 15, 000 revolutions.

In the next practical tip, we will show you how to create your own partitions on your hard drive.