External Hard Drive speed

With all the hard drive talk going around, I thought I would post a new thread with my question.

I used a Mac Mini for all my work (yes it is fast enough). I have an external 1.5tb WD Green that I am looking to possibly update. The Mini has a 5400rpm drive in it as the main. I run the external FW800 to the 1.5tb Green. I am looking at the WD 2TB Blacks as a replacement.

Would the Blacks be over kill since my main drive is only 5400? Would I see an increase in read/write speed with a 7200 Black drive?

The 1.5tb drive I would be transferring to my server if the Black drive is worth it. If not, I will just pick up a couple 2 TB drives this Friday.

Thanks

Yes, the 7200rpm drive will help performance, so long as it's firewire not usb.

tim wrote in post #11340145
Yes, the 7200rpm drive will help performance, so long as it's firewire not usb.

My main photo editing station is a Mini (this year's crop with the HDMI port), I run Aperture 3.1 and CS4 on the system, the Aperture library is on an external G-Drive FW800 drive (7200 RPM), the vault is on a second FW800 drive, but I've also got two USB 2.0 drives, one for photo archiving and web work (7200 RPM), the second for backups (1.5 Tb, 5400 RPM).

Works fine and snappy enough, I'll even do some light video editing (720P clips from my Powershot G12). FW800 is definitely nice, but USB 2.0 is workable.

I will probably go to a single RAID5 array on FW800 next year. OWC sells a nice one, there is also a Promise model that looks interesting. USB 2.0 is OK, FW800 is nice, but eSATA is even better. Too bad the Mac Mini doesn't have an eSata or an express card slot, I love the transfer rates I get on my MacBook Pro with the eSATA express card I use (I have externals that support eSATA, and data transfers just scream on that thing.)