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The faster your drive platters spin, the lower your seek time which translates to faster loading times. You notice it when doing tasks involving multiple simultaneous reads/writes

~THT
 
yeah, i guess the 7200/5400 has about 3/2 the power of the old 5400 rpm, but now a day people rarely sales 5400 rpm drives any more :)
 
. It not only lowers seek times(Very good) but improves transfer rates on the hole. It is a very noticeable difference during boot, loading and swap file usage.
. IDE drives' RPM range from 5400-7200-10,000, with 10K being the fastest. If you need a drive for performance, go as high as you can afford, but if you are going for shear mass storage, you may look at a 5400 due to it's lower price tag.
 
15K is the fastest I have seen for a hard drive, and it was SCSI. And yes, the faster they go the more noise they generate.
 
Note that higher RPMs do not guarantee faster transfer rates. The reason is that the faster you spin the disk, the less time each sector spends under the disk head. If the sectors are too small (i.e. the density of the platters is too great), heads won't be able to read them at high speed.

In most cases, the transfer rate improves fairly well when going from 5400 to 7200. It improves somewhat when going from 7200 to 10k. But it only improves slightly going from 10k to 15k.

If you're mostly dealing with large files in a single-user environment, then 7200 is fine. Once you start getting into multi-user environments, high RPMs become more important (as do the more advanced caching and queuing algorithms on SCSI drives).
 
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