Which hard drive should I go with?

I really don't know. That's the honest answer. Hypothetically speaking it depends on what you are doing. As with all software/hardware there must be a balance. If you aren't pressuring your HDD with lots of reading and writing like encoding and HD pictures where info is constantly flowing to and from your HDD I wouldn't pressure you to buy it. Imagine if you will a highway system. It flies through your CPU, through your 4+ GIGs of RAM, through your 1GIG Gddr5 pci 2.0 x16 GFX card and then it needs to be written to your drive. If it can't process that amount of info then there will be your bottleneck. I just bought a 1TB HDD. I did choose the 7200 RPM drive. Why? I do game a LOT. I stream public domain media 24/7. I am also surfing a lot. The gaming and the streaming are the couple of things I thought about although I just like the faster drive. The additional heat of course can be remedied with proper fan placement and air flow. a href="http://www.silverstonetek.com/tech/wh_positive.php?area=" rel="nofollow"http://www.silverstonetek.com/tech/wh_po…/a is a helpful site. Newegg.com, Amazon.com, Tigerdirect.com and Bestbuy.com are some sites you can check out for additional fans. You do need to have a place to plug in the additional fan on your motherboard or you can buy an adapter that will split your HDD wire. Just plug in the adapter and it will have one end to plug into your HDD and the other for your additional fan. Anyways just saying the heat isn't a real big issue when you take the proper steps. Like I said in the beginning everything needs to be balanced. Add some heat and you need to counter that with some cool. Take a look at that site concerning positive air flow. It isn't all about hurricane gale force winds blowing through. When I tested out one of my fans it reduced the HDD temp about 6 degrees.My Cool Master V8 reduced my CPU temp an incredible 20+c.From 54c at idle with stock fan and then 34c at idle. It gets as low as 26c at night when the ambient temp settles down. Currently 37c streaming public domain video with Manycam + FME& firefox and surfing on Chrome, answering your question on my other monitor. Bottom line? I would go with a 7200 all day long because of my computer habits. You can look through those online stores at the different brands and read the reviews to get a clearer picture as well as visiting benchmarking/business reviews. A certain amount of user ignorance taints the user reviews but overall the user reviews give a pretty good real world look. The con of the lab review is that it is exactly that. Everything is controlled. As far as Hard Drives go i would suggest Western Digital or Samsung or maybe Seagate. I WOULD NOT go for anything bigger than 1 TB. I really wouldn't go for anything bigger than 500GIG for your HDD with your operating system. If at all possible you want to buy a SSD in the future for a VERY noticeable change in pace. The write and seek times are insanely fast compared to your standard 7200rpm HDD when used the right way. Small so that just the OS and a few select programs go on there that will GREATLY benefit from the short seek times. Loading up a 80GIG SSD is just wrong. There won't be ANY benefit. You will NOTiCE the change when you load your OS on the SSD and the rest of the HDD is balanced.