Quote:
Originally Posted by milkpowder 
This is very true. Have a look at the THG benchmarks. The newer generation of high capacity (read 320-500GB) 5,400rpm HDDs either come extremely close to or exceed the performance of 7,200rpm HDDs in a multitude of tests, including average read/write transfer, maximum read/write transfer, PCMark file writing, etc... Of course, the 7,200rpm HDDs will be capable of higher I/O per second.
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milkpowder, could you kindly provide a link to those tests, please?
I'll be buying a MBP for myself later this summer and starting to think 5,400rpm option might be good enough, for what I do. Right now at home we have a PB with 5,400rpm and 2007 MBP with 7,200rpm, and the only real difference conceivably related to HD speed is that the MBP takes much longer to wake up and, especially go to sleep. The MBP is of course much faster otherwise, including boot time, but it's a completely different machine.
Also, I imagine 7,200rpm must be harder on the battery?.. And heat more?..
Sure, it all depends on what you do. The "work stuff" I do now on PB and will be doing on MB is 3D image reconstructions (structural biology) that take many hours to complete. Surprisingly (or not?) the HD speed does not seem to matter for this, since the bottleneck is - by far - calculation, not writing.