5400 RPM vs 7400 RPM Hard Drives

[Fliko]

I was doing some research on getting a laptop for music production.
(I plan on getting a Mac for my own reasons if anyone knows.).

I read a few times that if I was to purchase a Macbook, I should also purchase a firewire External Hard drive that runs at 7400 RPM compared to the 5400 RPM Hard Drives that come inside the Macbook.
This sets me back a few hundred dollars, I was wondering:
Would it really make that much of a difference? Is it worth the few hundred dollars to get a 7400 RPM Hard Drive to record, and master music?

 

[Asus]

I don't think a 5400RPM laptop drive is too slow for just recording audio. It wouldn't mess up the recording.

But having a 7200RPM external using Firewire 800 would be noticeably faster if you had to move/copy a number of Gigabytes, plus it would keep the internal drive free. The good external drives have both Firewire and USB for flexibility so you can connect it to other Computers with USB to get at the files. Although using Firewire (400) and USB 2.0 wouldn't really offer any better performance than the internal drive. They would limit the speed too much. Would still be more portable space though.

But it would be something else you have to carry around with your laptop.

 

[VirusType2]

I've never used a 5,400 RPM drive, strictly 7,200 RPM WD drives. But I've been doing audio tasks for years, and for audio editing and playback I can't see why you would need a fast drive. I don't think it will matter.


You won't want to play Oblivion on it, but for general computing you might hardly notice any difference I should think.