is there a rpm limit for hard drives for the acer nitro 5?

MRGREAT1508

I have a nitro 5 (AN517-51) and I was going to put another hard drive in the second slot for my computer but I was wondering if there was any kind of limit for rpm or anything else I should know while choosing a hard drive, and any recommendations would be helpful. 

aphanic

As for RPM limits, no, you can put a 7200 RPM drive in there no problem.

The only thing that could give you "problems" for lack of a better word are disks with SMR, and even then it depends on what your intent for that secondary disk is. It's lengthy to explain correctly but I'll try to be succinct.

The spinning platters inside of the HDDs are divided by tracks, circular tracks of the same width I believe, and the traditional recording technology, PMR was perpendicular to those tracks. SMR what it does is overlap those tracks for the most part of the disk (I bet if you look for SMR in YouTube of Wikipedia you find a better explanation).

Anyway, the problem comes when you want to modify data in one of the tracks that overlaps with others, you (or rather, the disk controller) first have to move the data off those other tracks to modify it and that takes the disk unsuitable for scenarios in which you're changing data constantly. They are useful as backup drives I guess, because you write once, and read as many times as you need to access the data (reading is no problem).

There was a recent debacle because some companies were silently using SMR without specifying it even on NAS drives where those disks are unsuitable for and I think they now disclose the writing technology of the disk. There's a guy that's a hero maintaining a database on how many platters and disk heads each model has (the more platters, the more heat for example) and he has SMR detailed for each or most of the disks as well.

There's a cache, that's used to give the disk time to rearrange the data, but if your workload is fast enough and you exhaust that cache you'll see speeds quickly drop. I think that was the problem with NAS drives, because that was happening on RAIDs and systems that managed the drives thought those disks were dying and got them out of the RAID; but I digress.

With the current 7mm drives we have I think there are no drive of more than 500GB that doesn't use SMR. They're fine as secondary drives, don't get me wrong, just not as primary ones (for me, personal opinion), or for development in which builds are being done again and again, I don't know.

Other than that... RPM is no problem, the laptop is capable of supplying the power the disk needs to work.

aphanic

As for RPM limits, no, you can put a 7200 RPM drive in there no problem.

The only thing that could give you "problems" for lack of a better word are disks with SMR, and even then it depends on what your intent for that secondary disk is. It's lengthy to explain correctly but I'll try to be succinct.

The spinning platters inside of the HDDs are divided by tracks, circular tracks of the same width I believe, and the traditional recording technology, PMR was perpendicular to those tracks. SMR what it does is overlap those tracks for the most part of the disk (I bet if you look for SMR in YouTube of Wikipedia you find a better explanation).

Anyway, the problem comes when you want to modify data in one of the tracks that overlaps with others, you (or rather, the disk controller) first have to move the data off those other tracks to modify it and that takes the disk unsuitable for scenarios in which you're changing data constantly. They are useful as backup drives I guess, because you write once, and read as many times as you need to access the data (reading is no problem).

There was a recent debacle because some companies were silently using SMR without specifying it even on NAS drives where those disks are unsuitable for and I think they now disclose the writing technology of the disk. There's a guy that's a hero maintaining a database on how many platters and disk heads each model has (the more platters, the more heat for example) and he has SMR detailed for each or most of the disks as well.

There's a cache, that's used to give the disk time to rearrange the data, but if your workload is fast enough and you exhaust that cache you'll see speeds quickly drop. I think that was the problem with NAS drives, because that was happening on RAIDs and systems that managed the drives thought those disks were dying and got them out of the RAID; but I digress.

With the current 7mm drives we have I think there are no drive of more than 500GB that doesn't use SMR. They're fine as secondary drives, don't get me wrong, just not as primary ones (for me, personal opinion), or for development in which builds are being done again and again, I don't know.

Other than that... RPM is no problem, the laptop is capable of supplying the power the disk needs to work.