Hard Drive Upgrade Question (Aperture Related)

[odinsride]

I am planning to upgrade my 3x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black drives to some 3TB drives. My current drives are 7200rpm, but I would consider buying 5400rpm drives if they would be suitable for Aperture...so here is my question:

I store my Aperture library on a 1TB 7200rpm drive currently. If I replaced this drive with a 5400rpm drive, how much of a difference would I be able to notice when working on pictures? My RAW images are generally 20-30mb each, and I use brushes in Aperture extensively. Currently I notice some sluggishness when using Brushes but I'm not sure if that's due to the hard drive or my overall system.

FYI, I have a 2010 Mac Pro 3.33ghz 6 Core with 12gb ram, and OSX and my Library folder reside on an SSD

Thanks!

 

[duncanapple]

My old machine was a 2.4ghz alum macbook with 4gb ram - granted that was prob my main bottleneck, but I upgraded the HD in that laptop from 5400rpm 250gb (stock) to a denser 7200rpm 500gb WD Black drive. I saw a noticeable uptick in performance. For the price difference I wouldn't move to slower drives. Perhaps your backup you could get away with a 5400rpm, but I would def keep your files on the faster disk(s). I also have a camera that produces some huge raw files, and I think they need every resource you can throw at them. My current set up is much better, but photos still take that 1-2 seconds to load when I am flipping through them.