<<<...But in the end, it's not going to make a lot of difference which one you choose. Parallel ATA drives aren't going anywhere for quite a while, and there's no real performance benefit for SATA at this time.
7200 rpm vs. 5400 rpm vs. 4200 rpm
The main thing Tom's hard drive review covered was hard drive performance. The drives covered were all 80 and 100 GB drives, other than the 60GB 7200 RPM Hitachi drive. Here is a quick table to summarize the Maximum and Minimum throughput, which is generally the biggest advantage that hard drives with faster spindle speeds (RPM) have. Throughput and access time (an average of how fast the hard drive can find data) are the primary specs that determine the overall performance of a hard drive. With access time, lower is better. By the way, drive manufacturers usually report "seek time" instead of "access time." They do this primarily because seek time is a lower number. Average seek time is the average of time it takes the heads to move into position to read data. Access Time is the average of the time it takes the drive to respond with the first bit of data after the read command is issued. This includes the time it takes the heads to move to the right area, but also the electronics in transferring the commands and data. It is usually a more reliable picture of actual drive responsiveness. While faster RPMs do tend to indicate faster performance, as you can see by comparing the Fujitsu 4200 RPM and Samsung 5400 RPM, that isn't always the case. Also, look at the differences themselves. The average 5400 RPM drive is about 35 MB/s max while the average 4200 RPM drive is about 30 MB/s max throughput. This is a 15% difference... not a whole lot. It's even a bit less going from 5400 to 7200 RPM. Let's assume that it takes 3 seconds to open an application, and it is totally hard drive speed limited... more>>>