How Important is RPM for Hard Drives

For music library purposes, hard drive RPM and seek time are unimportant. Seek time is important only if you are reading a lot of small files scattering all over the disk. Music files are relatively large files so don't worry about RPM and seek time.

In fact, I would buy low RPM drives because they are usually quieter. I like the WD green drives. They are variable RPM drives, very quiet, and runs relatively cool. I have six 1T green drives, two of them are almost 2 years old, the other four are 1 year old, never have any problem.

After having 5 spinnning hard drives fail in 5 years, I'm waiting for ss drives to become bigger and more affordable before spending time loading all my music onto them.

I wouldn't fill a hard drive more than 70 percent; the performance comes to a crawl as it fills up. The spin rate will help during the initial transfer to some extent - if you are copying data from another hard drive. If you are loading new discs, the CD-ROM is the bottleneck, not the hard drive. I would get two green drives and run them as a striped RAID for faster transfer rates (which will help speed data transfer to your backup, which I recommend).

Another option is the Drobo device, which is like a RAID but tolerates drive failures with less user headache than a RAID.

If you are paranoid, buy Enterprise class drives with the 5 year warranty. The price difference may be worth the piece of mind, especially if you've invested time and hassle of ripping your own CDs. I ripped about 250 discs onto my HD and it was tedious and I have still to fix all the metadata. I don't want to duplicate my efforts and would rather lay out for the data redundancy.

I am mostly investing in cheap 2tb drives and making sure I have several redundent backups. I had a RAID drive but it was super noisy and the disks didn't stop spinning when my computer slept. Perhaps a better RAID drive would help. I'm basically buying naked SATA drives and putting them in existing enclosures.

I recently replaced a WD "Green" 1.5 TB drive (essentially 5400 RPM) in my music server with a 1.5 TB 7200 RPM Seagate.

There is no difference in music playback, nor in selecting music to play.

The only difference I've found is the 7200 RPM drive backs up much faster and it is also faster if one re-indexes the library. (A Squeezeboxserver wipe & rescan is about 75 minutes on the 7200 RPM versus over 2 hours on the 5400 RPM drive.)

Both of the latter items are only maintenance issues done in the background and do not interfere with the playback. My music server is in a different room so drive noise is not an issue.