Hard Drive – Difference Between 7200 RPM and 5400 RPM Laptop Drives

I got the 7200RPM fitted into my MBP (it's about 2-3 months old). I use VM Fusion all day long and wanted the best VM performance I could get. My MBP is on all day, 6 days a week, and it's always busy - and I've never had the drive overheat, on battery or mains. There will always be a few bad drives in any batch, but I would say that if you run large, disk intensive applications (virtual machines, photoshops, movie and photo editing) then you should consider the faster drive.

I can't see how a faster drive is going to have a huge impact on games - the graphics card, available memory, processor speed and optical disk speed will all have a bigger impact than the hard drive speed, I would have thought.

In both cases there will definitely be performance gains to see from either. Hard drive performance is a function of a few things, such as:

1. Drive bus type (IDE ATA66/100/133, SATA150/300/60, SCSI, FC, etc. Affects the upper bound maximum speed, and burst speed from the drive's cache)
2. Drive rotational speed (Affects sequential read and write speeds and seek latencies. Faster platters = R/W head gets from point A to B that much quicker.)
3. Drive size (The larger a drive, the greater the density of data per square inch, so read/write speeds are that much faster.)
4. Number of platters (The fewer platters there are, the greater density (again). Also, noise, heat, and power consumption tend to be lower for a drive that only has to spool up one metal disk instead of five.)
5. Drive firmware revisions (Any gains from these would pale in comparison to changes in the above, but for conciseness's sake, it's possibly a factor.)

Today's 1TB+ 7200 RPM hard drives are quite capable of outperforming older 10KRPM server hard drives simply due to the incredible amount of data flying under the drive read/write heads every rotation. Additionally, the price per GB sweet spot lives up in the highest capacity drives.

I believe that at the time of this writing, the greatest platter density is about 500 GB/in^2, which Samsung uses in their Spinpoint drives. These manage enough read/write throughput to actually saturate an ATA133 connection (finally!), so a 1TB+ drive might be choked a little under a SATA150 connection for bursty reads form the disk cache.

Either way I would definitely suggest grabbing a ~$100 USD 1.5 TB drive and connecting it via SATA150. SATA also has the bonus of being the cheaper interface, at the moment; equivalently sized IDE drives tend to carry a bit of a price premium now for being the older, deprecated technology.