Comparing a 7200 RPM 3.5” form factor drive to a 5400 RPM 2.5” form factor drive is like comparing apples to oranges. While a smaller drive might have a smaller RPM, the density of the 2.5” drive’s platters is more than the 3.5” drive. Also, the RPM speed refers to the outer most rim of the disk. Not the core. Meaning most of the time you are using a 3.5” drive, the speeds actually never touch the 7200 RPM and are often in the 5400 RPM range. Not to mention the increased size in a 3.5” drive means seek times across platers is slightly higher than a 2.5” drive.
As far as terminal commands you can us on a Mac to test performance, dd is a great tool for simple benchmarking. So let us assume one drive is mounted as the volume 7200RPM_Drive and the other is 5400RPM_Drive, you could run these tests. First, let’s test the write speed of the 7200RPM_Drive like this:
time dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/7200RPM_Drive/testfile bs=1024k count=2048
And now check the read speed like this:
time dd of=/dev/null if=/Volumes/7200RPM_Drive/testfile bs=1024k
Note the way this dd test works is by creating a file named testfile based on the output of /dev/zero for a write test. And then it reads the same testfile. You get a fairly decent benchmark of speed by doing this.
You can do this with the 5400RPM_Drive like this for the write test:
time dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/5400RPM_Drive/testfile bs=1024k count=2048
And this for the read test:
time dd of=/dev/null if=/Volumes/5400RPM_Drive/testfile bs=1024k
Now when all is said and done, this might give you a new tool to give you the same conclusion: One drive is slower than the other. The only thought I could have then would be the fact you have both of these drives connected to your Mac via USB enclosures. And the Plugable USB 3.0 SuperSpeed SATA III Lay-Flat Hard Drive Docking Station (ASMedia ASM1053E SATA III to USB Chipset, UASP and 6TB+ Drive Support) might not be correctly handling the 7200RPM drive. Meaning the drive is good, but the docking station is not the speed demon it claims to be. I have often seen different mixes of drives behave differently in the same USB enclosure; remember not all bridging circuitry is the same. And if the enclosure is USB 3.0 rated, perhaps the USB 2.0 speed is not great?
Another idea is checking how the USB enclosures are connected. Sometimes of they are on the same USB bus as USB 1.1 devices such as keyboards and mice that could throttle speed down. If there is any way to isolate the connection the USB drive is on that would be the best way to check again.
But when all is said and done when you state the following in the comments:
A lot of people on the 7200-RPM drive's Amazon reviews commented on
how fast it is, but I have found it to be slower than my other drives,
so I'm wondering if the drive I got has a defect.
I’m fairly confident that users commenting on the relative speed of this internal drive are using them with internal, direct SATA connections. And not using a USB enclosure or bridging device. In general, I do not think you received a defective drive. But am fairly confident based on real-world experience that the USB bridging enclosure you have might not be as fast or robust as it claims to be.
This happened to me many years ago.
At that time I found to my surprise that a disk is detected or not by its
stamp, found in the first few bytes in the first sector.
If one of these bytes is corrupted, the disk is lost.
This is called the Disk Signature.
At that time, I solved the problem by copying these bytes from a similar disk,
but I really don't remember how many bytes I copied or using which tool.
I suggest that it would be better to use disk rescue tools to fix the first
sector.
TestDisk might do the job,
as explained in the article
How To Fix: External Disk Drive Suddenly Became RAW.
The
NTFS Data Recovery Toolkit
is another possibility, but others such products do exist.
For more information and some manual methods see :
Best Answer
Try instead connecting it to the VM as a physical disk. (VMWare Documentation (perm link))
Have you opened Windows Disk Management to see if its listed there? Otherwise you may need to install VMware guest drivers in Windows.
Also, the filesystem on the drive must be compatible with Windows. If you formatted it on the Mac as HFS+, you'll need to format it as NTFS/(ex)FAT/UDF or your choice of cross platform filesystem.