What an asnwer!!

This was the Question:

Does anybody know of a 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA 7200RPM HDD?

I currently have a 1TB 2.5inch 5400rpm in my MacBook Pro, but its extremely slow. So I was wondering if anybody knew of a 7200RPM/Faster version. Thanks.

And such an intelligent, well researched and experienced answer was:

The answers here seem to be quite misinformed, as is the question. Revs per minute has little to do with transfer speed, and you wouldn't want a 7200rpm drive in your notebook for fear of explosion! Let me explain...

Imagine you have a blank text book, and on each page you write a letter. Where there are spaces, you leave the page blank. Reading this is simple: Just seek to the page you want to read and interprete it byte-by-byte. It's slow, though... Turning pages constantly, and the book becomes huge! How do you make reading faster, easier and at the same time make the book smaller? Write more on a page. This is exactly what notebook hard drives do.

So now we have a book (hard drive platter) that consists of a group of chapters (heads) and pages (sectors). Seeking is quicker, but we can't seek straight to any byte we want any more. We have to extract the information we want from our 512KB sectors. Furthermore, when we delete a file (with our white-out or eraser), we're left with blank pages in the middle of the book. There are only so many pages in our book, and we have to reuse those later. That's file fragmentation, and it means we end up writing parts of files in one sector and other parts in another; there are more seeks there slowing us down! (Keep your hard disk defragmented ;)

The more dense the drive is, the more information it can extract in a single operation (that's transfer rate). What you're referring to as "speed" is what people usually mean as "transfer rate", and "speed" is the term used to describe how long it takes for a single operation to be completed. Yes, 7200rpm drives have a faster seek time. No, I wouldn't say they have a faster transfer rate. There are too many other factors involved.

If you want fast transfer rate for a particular task, partition off 10-15% of the start of the drive and use that partition for that task. This will give you faster seek times and less fragmentation across that partition, too. If you want sub-millisecond seek times, go for an SSD or get some more RAM as the others have suggested. I presume you mean "fast RAM", since having a "high amount" of RAM bears little relevance to speed unless your computer is constantly swapping. If that's the case, more RAM would be the best option.

Sorry to disappoint you, but there is no way you'll find a hard drive or SSD that can "keep up with your fast processor and high amount of ram". Computers are built with different quantities of different quality components. Your computer might have 16MB of really fast RAM, known as L1 cache memory inside your CPU. Then you might have 4MB per core of slightly slower L2 cache memory, also inside your CPU. Then you have your DDR3 RAM, 16GB of it, and that's about 10 times slower than your L1 cache! The reason for this is that fast memory is expensive, and architectures have been designed to encourage programs to optimise for small amounts of fast memory.

Lets put numbers on this: RAM speed (transfer rate) is commonly measured in frequency: DDR3 is anywhere between 100mhz and 266mhz. Multiply that by 64 and you get the transfer rate in megabytes per second. 266*64; some sticks of DDR3 can transfer at 17GB/sec! L1 cache might be 1066mhz instead of 266mhz. What about hard drives? They have this weak little controller (SATA-3) that limits them to 6 gigabits per second; How can you expect a device limited by it's controller like that to be able to transfer 17 gigabytes per second to keep up with RAM? You'll probably need over 40 controllers. That'd be an impressive RAID ;) but I doubt it'd fit into your MBP.

Any Doubts??