HDD spin speed

Does the spin speed (5400 vs 7200 RPM) of a hard drive make much of a difference? I'm considering a laptop and they're giving me a choice between capacities and speeds. I do mostly photo and video editing. Should I get the faster drive?

 

5400 will work fine, but 7200 will out perform it. You probably won't notice much of a difference unless you're a power user and tax your computer pretty hard. I'd look for capacity not speed. Especially in a laptop.

 

5400 is not fast enough to transfer more than a few minutes of video without dropped frames/audio synchronisation errors. Its fine for static graphics though.
You also need stacks of memory for this sort of work. Laptops are far from ideal for graphics/video work but see the discussion in this post.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=117666&highlight=defrag

Studio T

 

Thanks for the replies. I do have another HDD where I store all the videos, music, and photos. But I do use the main drive when I build a DVD or am converting music files for storage. I'm thinking of going with the 7200 RPM version.

The system would look like this:
WinXP home
Intel Core 2 Duo T5200 (1.60GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 533 MHz FSB)
80 GB 7200
2 GB RAM
8x DVD burner
256 MB ati radeon graphics

I was using a 3 GHz intel pentium 4, 1 GB RAM and all my videos came out fine. Would it make any difference if the first system listed was in a desktop or laptop? I want to be able to take it when I travel to upload photos and videos to it (and the extra drive).