MacBook Pro - 7200 vs 5400 rpm drives - Heat and Noise

I am looking at a new 15" MacBook Pro for development purposes. I am planning to run a Virtual Machine for about 50% of my work (Windows 7 x64, IIS, SQL Server, and VS 2010). The upgrade from a 5400 rpm drive to a 7200 rpm is only $45. From what I understand the faster rotational speed of the 7200 rpm drive will help virtual machine performance. However, I am concerned that additional heat and fan noise might be an issue. I will be running mostly on A/C power so decreased battery life is not a major concern for me.

Since I would be running with a Core i7 processor which gives off a fair amount of heat already I was wondering if it might be best to stay at 5400 rpm for the hard drive. What do you all think? Thanks!

Solution 1:

Go for the 7200 RPM drive. It will help the VM somewhat but there will be otherfactors. We recently tried an Intel SSD for running VMs directly on the laptop and it was a great improvement. I would suggest running the VM on an external eSATA(fireWire) drive to get better performance. That way the OS and the VM won't be competing for disk I/O.