A couple of HardDrive questions after a scare

Long story short, I have somehow damaged my main external HardDrive by removing it prematurely while my MacBook was shutting down, but luckly i backed it up that same day. I have tried some basic repairs with no success I will try a few more things later.
due to this I will like to add some more redundancy to my setup.
My questions are
1. I plan on adding a dual HardDrive setup in my MBP with one being a SSD for my apps and a 500gb or 750gb for storage.
Is it worth me spending the money to upgrade my current 750gb 5400rpm HD to a 500gb 7200rpm HD?
Will I notice a significant difference between the two considering it will only be used or storage?
2. Also, will I notice a difference In performance using a Owc Elite mini which spins at 7200rpm but has less cache than my current seagate goflex?

Sent from my iPhone

first off what exactly is going on with your other hard drive?

1. - you really wouldn't notice much in my experience anyways...rpm is only half the equation. you also want to get a drive with a higher cache usually between 32mb and 64mb cache

2. see answer to number 1

I was running ipartition to expand a different partition on that hard drive. I decided to cancel it since it was taking a long time and I ended shutting down the computer some time later. I'm assuming that ipartition might of still been running in the background even though I canceled it.

still doesn't answer what the hard drive is doing. is it detected by the computer at all? does it power up? if its not detected by the OS is it atleast detected in your device manager (since your using OSx it should be under "about this mac"). these things help determine if its recoverable or not.

It's detected in ipartition and disk utility but it shows up as Unkown hard drive. Also disk repair in disk utility says it's unable to fix the drive.

make sure you get at least a 120gb ssd, it fills up quick. i wouldnt worry about rpm , I would recommend a western digital .

if you are unable to mount the drive because of some bad partitioning , you maybe able to mount it through the terminal. you will have to read a little its not to hard tho. I messed up a hd but was still able to access it through Ubunto (linux os) . you can download a free boot cd/dvd .

basically what issicus said..and sorry had to go and rescue my roommates fiance on the side of the road with him.

what have you done to the drive so far as you said you've tried a few things already?

I have tried the following:
- using disk utility "disk repair"
- Imanually mounting it through disk utility
- I tried to see if my Dell Notebook would recognize it in which it didnt

Right now I am considering give diskwarrior a go, but I am still open to any suggestion that might work.

About the SSD, I think I am going to order one of those 256GB crucial M4s. They seem to get good reviews on the forums.

crucial is loved by enthusiasts .
i am on win right now, so i cant test, i have used osx a lot tho
this is what you need to do. open terminal enter "fdisk -l" it should list all partitions/drives. what you are looking for is more then one partition on the drive. if there is only one partition you deleted everything on the drive. if there are two you should probably find some one to extract the stuff from it.

I just tried DiskWarrior and it said directory cannot be rebuilt. The file system is unsupported. It also says this is not a mac disk.
Let me see what terminal says.

Oh yeah, don't mess with things while partitioning tools are running, you'll screw things up bigtime. I guess you learned that the hard way.

1. With your OS and cache on an SSD the existing drive should be fine for data.
2. I don't know how much difference cache makes on hard drives, especially if you have enough ram. I suspect not much.

Since you did back it up, how about a low-level format, just totally wipe it clean?

easier way is to get an ubuntu live disc and hook it up to there. it has a way of bypassing alot of the crap that both osx and windows have troubles with when drives become corrupted.

Before I wipe it clean, I would like to try one more thing. What windows 7 programs are comparable to TestDisk, Data Rescue, etc?
I have had no luck with google.

The ubuntu method looks like a last resort since I would need to source the necessary parts.