Sure you are entitled to your opinion, as am I, and I gave you mine. Could I be more blunt and direct? Possibly. But rude and insulting? Where? Nowhere in my post I attacked you personally, called you names, or questioned your integrity.
Okay, if it's not insulting to you, I'll use your own words (no offense intended): I call what you said above BS. It's just a teeny bit of a cop out to say, paraphrasing you, "That's just BS. If anyone says... blah blah, they don't have a clue... etc," when you are obviously referring to what waywardsage had just said. So, he had some reason to feel like you threw a needless swing his direction. I noticed it. Your opinion is valid, and even welcomed, but it's just your opinion. Please try to express it without a "know it all" attitude where you are demeaning to what someone else just said. Just be cool, because what you said certainly has validity, but not everyone feels that way.
Now, with regards to the Scorpio Blue and the 7200.4, WD made a really good and fast 5400rpm drive. It is still slower than the faster rotating Seagate, but it is also $50 cheaper. Also, large hard disks are typically going to be faster than smaller specimen at the same rotational speed, as their platter density is higher, which translates in higher performance. So if you currently have a 160GB or 320GB 5400rpm drive, you will get a noticeable improvement with a 500GB 5400rpm drive.
Fast drives are noticed whenever you access your disk. Be it to boot, start a program or load documents into a program. If you are doing memory intensive tasks where you will hit your physical memory limit and start swapping, or use extremely large files like with video editing, you will notice it even more.
You make some good points. That's why I bought a WD Scorpio Blue 500gig drive for my MBP. It's been the best $89 I've ever spent.
But regardless, faster drives are ALWAYS better. There is absolutely no reason at all to recommend using a slower drive at any time other than budgetary constraints.
Here's where I part ways with you... because slow has a couple of meanings here. Platter rotation speed... and performance speed (access, read/write throughput, etc.) A buyer can gain lots of performance by upgrading his smaller 5400 drive, or even some 7200 rpm drives for the WD 500 Scorpio Blue
and save money by getting a "slower" drive that happens to be "faster" than most other current drives out there, with only a few exceptions. So, budget is only
one issue. Bang for the buck, size of data storage, vibration, noise, heat and reliability... are all issues worth considering. If speed is the only thing, then hook up to your velociraptor RAID setup on your desk and have at it, or get a 'cost is no consideration' SSD. What's a 500gig SSD with top performance going for these days?
Anyway, just some variations on the subject of "what matters." It all will be individual, based on what's important. We know what's important to you - you told us. But you're just you, and it might not fit someone else.
As far as 5400rpm or 7200rpm drive love around here, I don't know. I come from the PC world, and I would guess that world is more performance oriented whereas the MAC world typically has been more oriented to what Apple wanted them to have as there used to be not much other choice.
I'm a PC user, also lived in that world, and from what I saw it was only a certain segment of the PC world was performance obsessed. Most bought on budget, and I saw more bottom-feeder PCs desktop boxes and laptops than I did the high-end stuff. Sure, the hot rods of the PC world certainly exist, and all the custom parts at Fry's for the homebuilt crowd, but most folks I worked with just wanted their PC to get the job done, which was usually running Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.,) IE, Outlook, and other similar business or home office type stuff. They weren't running souped up gaming rigs. In fact it was amazing how non-leading edge most PC users I know really are. They liked where they were, running XP on some 2 year old machine, or a budget box from Best Buy. I think a lot of Mac (not an acronym, BTW) users aren't all that "performance" obsessed either, as long as it works reliably and is easy to use, mainly because Macs are generally good performing machines in the real world. For the performance driven Mac people, the Mac Pro multi-core machines are pretty damn good off the shelf, even just being measured strictly as Windows machines.
