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.