[anguish]

Yeah, the Blue drives are nice and quiet. I know full well it's the difference in the RPM's.. I don't regret going Blue at all with my new Mini 10v...although I do maybe kinda wish I would have went with the 500 GB..

[mattchiro]

Although the blue is 5400 like my current drive in here. Wonder if it's worth the upgrade? I don't need to space as this is my kick around take to uni netbook so i might just wait and get a 32GB/64GB SSD when the price comes down.

All my data is stored on my MacBook Pro and 500GB ext hdd so the documents I use on my netbook are all synced with Dropbox

[hotrodminis]

Wait for the 64 to get into your price range. I thought a 32 was going to be plenty for a kicking around computer, but I discovered that once you can add just one more thing, it fills right up.

[vfr]

I found the difference between a 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM hard drive is rather small. It turns out that because of the rather slow 1.6 GHz Atom processor, the Dell Mini's are more CPU bound than disk I/O bound - at least under OS X. You get a better performance bump going from 1 GB of RAM to 2 GB of RAM.

WD also claims that their 7200 RPM drives use the same amount of power as their 5400's: WD Scorpio Black 320 GB SATA Hard Drives ( WD3200BJKT ) vs WD Scorpio Blue 160 GB SATA Hard Drives ( WD1600BEVT ). 500 mA while read/write, 400 mA while idle.