How much does RPM matter?

3.8%

Well, not really...I have no numbers, but I do agree with your friend, it had been wiser to pay a few extra dollars for a 7200 rpm drive.
They are faster, no doubt about that. I have a 7200rpm drive and compared to my old 5400 drive, it´s a lot faster.

7200rpm is a lot faster. I have 2 WD drive, both are ATA33, one is 5400rpm, one is 7200rpm. From the benchmark, it has about 30% diff

I see, thanks for the info. I'll buy a 7200RPM drive soon, and intall my OS and games and stuff on that. Then just use the 60Gig 5400RPM for storage.

That's a good idea. The faster rotational speed of a 7200RPM drive will offer much better performance, and will significantly lower seek times.

Rob
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7200 is a very nice improvement over 5400.

...

All other things being equal a 7200 RMP drive will be faster then a 5400 RPM. There are two things affected by the RPM of a drive.

Seek time, on avarage a 7200 rpm drive will spend less time waiting for the head to reach the sector on the disk it needs to read.

Transfer rate, the speed data passes the read head. There are two factors that effect this, the RPM of the drive and the density of the data on the disk.

If you have two 20 Gb/platter drives a 7200 will beat a 5400. If you have a new 20 Gb/platter 5400 RPM drive and an old 1Gb/platter 7200 RPM drive the 5400 RPM drive will win by a large margen, transfer rate could be 3 or 4 times that of old drive.

Tom.

hd RPM increase => hd perf increase.


if you know you don't know, the way could be more easy.