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Speaking of this, is it worth it to spend the extra $ for 10k rpm as opposed to 7200 rpm?

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The only 10K SATA hard drives I know of have much more limited capacity than the 7200rpm drives. If you get a 7200rpm drive with the 8MB cache and native command queing, NCQ (I think I got that accronym right) you'll do fine. 10K rpm generates A LOT of heat. SCSI drives go up to 15K, but you pay a very high price for that and usually need additional hardware like a SCSI board.