5400 VS 7200 RPM HDD

how big are these photos that you are looking at?
boot times, I don't understand why people put such a big emphasis on this, even with fast SSD's, you're only shaving a few seconds off in most cases.
Program load times would be faster but again, unless you're loading up a monster program, we're talking like 1-2 seconds difference from 5400rpm drives in most cases.
Depends on the 500GB drive you are thinking of.
The best buy for 7200rpm drive at this time is the Seagate 7200.3 320GB. It's around $94 CAN. I don't know where you are located so I can't give you locale-specific pricing.

 

Well according to StorageReviews and 7200 vs 5400 can take almost have the less loading time for Windows to startup.

Especially if it's has more platters like a 320Gb 7200rpm hard drive a may even shave minutes on loading time depending on what is being loaded.

On topic, a 7200rpm hard drive would kill a SSD anyday...So ya it's worth the upgrade.

 

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15079/6

Not quite as convincing. Look at the difference between the Scorpio Blue (5400) vs Black (7200). Or between the Seagate models (note that the 5400.4 uses less dense platters as well).

A 7200rpm hard disk will not "kill" an SSD unless you are comparing to the junk ones that come with the Aspire One (or other low end netbooks). The newer OCZ Core or Patriot Warp v2 SSD's will beat the fastest 7200rpm 2.5" disk on pretty much everything, and they are actually much better with multi-tasking and smaller writes than they used to be. The onboard controller is very important and those using the jmicron controller are garbage, I will agree with you on this 100% that if you get an SSD with a jMicron controller, that a 7200rpm hard drive would be a better option.

 

get the 500GB WD Blue, it should use 250GB platters so the write speeds should be very comparable to 320GB 7200rpm hard drive. The main thing will be access time that will be different when comparing the 2.

Don't get the hitachi drive, it is 12.5mm height and you need 9.5mm models.

 

no idea, i'm not in the US. Sorry.

Not that it's a huge dealbreaker but the WD blue only have 3 year warranty whereas the black are 5 year.

 

Stick with 7200rpm hard drive. You'll definitely notice the speed increase due to lower access time.

My 74GB 10000rpm WD Raptop is living proof.

If you want your OS, programs and games to load/respond faster, get 72000rpm drive.

If you need and external hard drive for storage and data transfer or just want large internal hard drive, get 5400rpm with 3 or more platters (320GB above).

 

Yup, that WD drive is badass (Black). You can't go wrong buying the drive, it has very low access times for a 160GB per platter hard drive (14ms) not to mention high transfer rates (75MB/s) taken on HDTune from reviews.

In my case the Seagate 7200.3 320GB costs $40 less then the WD and $10 less then the Hitachi 7K320 320GB. I still prefer Hitachi though, when they first branded Deskstar drives (aka DeathStars) from IBM I was among the first to try them out ever since then I've loved Hitachi hard drives for speed, performance and reliability. They (Hitachi) do seam in most cases more expensive then other brands (WD, Seagate and Maxtor at the time) and run a little more noisy.

My 80GB Deskstar has been off Hitachi's 3 year warranty for almost year and a half now and still going strong on what is now my brother's desktop computer.