So, I have a 5400rpm mechanical hard drive that was in my laptop but which I replaced by an SSD. But the SSD is only a 120 gb one so storage is a tad tight, I carry an external drive with me, but having to constantly rely on my it and copying/reading files to/from every so often is a bit of a nuisance. Though it forces me to properly manage my file structure and whatnot, which is useful.
As said in the topic headline: Is it possible to run a 5400rpm hdd at a higher speed? I'm guessing that the configuration files and on how to drive works are stored on the HDD itself so it would require specialized hardware and software. Is it at all possible? Are 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives built differently or is the difference mainly in software?
I'd assume they have different hardware, specifically different motors, I don't think the speed i set by the firmware. I could be wrong.
The closest thing I can think of to overclocking a hard drive it partitioning off the first part of the disk (not sure what the optimal percentage is) as the first part of the disk is faster than the last, as it is on the outside of the disk and therefore for a given rpm you get more blocks per minute as the circumference of the platter is larger toward the outside.
The 5400rpm drive was the only drive in the laptop - so storage + OS. So single file transfer or multiple files, but only a write/read happening, over USB3 is fine, having a bunch of reads/writes happening simultaneously the drive gets a bit slow.
the short answer is they are different and no you can not do what you want. The longer answer is nothing is impossible and there may be some makers of hard drives that have just binned the motors rather than having two different speeds but even then you have to hope the circuit boards are the same between their 7200 and 5400rpm drives where the only difference is the drivers which is not a guarantee as a lot of older drives 5200rpm drives were made with different cheaper parts as they were intended for a lower price point.
But even if you did get lucky in all those respects you would still only see a moderate gain in seek speeds. as RPM on its own only affects that the circuit boards affect read write speeds.
You can but NOT reccomended at all. the platters are like cpus in the fact that they are binned. So 5400 rpm platters are not balenced enoungh for 7200 rpm operation.
As others have said, it's basically impossible. But you can optimize it. You can use a program like Ultimate Defrag to place important files and folders that are accessed more often on the outer rings of the HDD and files that aren't accessed very often on the inner rings.
The closest I can think of is "short stroking" before SSD's were a thing there were real expensive raptor drives. Most of us couldn't afford them. What we would do is buy a cheap large drive (500Gb) and short stroke it. This is done by making the partition a fraction of the total capacity but lay it down at the outer edge of the platter. Seek time was improved because the partition was relatively small. Data transfer was up because of the relative speed of reading the data from the fastest portion of the drive. The result was a drive with very similar performance of the WD Raptor's but also similar low capacity of around 120Gb at a fraction of the cost.
I fear this will not help you in your situation but may act as a small history lesson for those that have never heard of short stroking an HDD.
@PendragonUK and @ImprovizoR have it right. You need to use the fastest areas of the drive only. You can see the effect in these screenshots of my 2TB WD Black:
partition 2 is the main 1.9TB partition and starts at the first block of the drive (on the outer edge). As the blocks move inwards you can see the read throughput drop off. Partition 1 is a small swap partition at the end of the drive and its throughput with the same sample size is much slower than the beginning of Partition 2.
I had once "overclocked" a hard drive motor and made it spin a bit faster. I couldn't tell you how much more but I can tell you the thing exploded after 10 minutes, as I had expected.
It is more worth the time to get a 10 or 15000 RPM drive if you can get one free like a velociraptor drive or something. I put one in an old imac and its about as fast as if I put an SSD in, at least I can't notice a difference.
The partition method doesn't make it run faster but it helps. If one makes a small partition then a larger one, the small partition is on the outside of the disk and the material under the head is moving faster. See how the vertical red line is taller than the blue one?
I used to reserve the fast partition for the Windows temporary swap file.
