5400 RPM or 7200 RPM?

[johnnymk]

A friend of mine who does Karaoke via laptop wants to buy an external USB hard drive. I don't know whether he has a 4200 RPM or a 5400 RPM HD within the laptop.

Would the transfer speed to/from the laptop's hard drive be improved with a 7200 RPM external hard drive or would a 5400 RPM be adequate, since I assume that the laptop HD would be the bottleneck.

He will only be accessing a 5 MB song at a time.

[redcolours]

go for the 7200RPM external drive. its not as fast as internal drives, but the extra rotational speed does help for a faster response time, especially with external drives using either USB or firewire.

the only thing is the noise - 7200s tend to be a bit noisier, but to tell you the truth, i dont even notice the noise difference between the two. plus really theres not much difference in price, given the same storage capacity.

[MikeD]

7200. Much easier to find than 5400's too...

[Jeffbx]

Another thing to keep in mind - the 7200 will suck more battery life than the 5400. If he's running on battery this might be a consideration.

[johnnymk]

The reason I am considering a 5400 RPM unit is that eCost has a 300 GB one for right under $100