What's the current 'best' fast but quiet 7200 rpm HDD? Samsung F3?
What's the current platter size? It's impossible to find specs on the Samsung / Seagate site. Does 1 vs 2 platters still matter?

Looking for a drive for a new system, SSD is too expensive.

Platter size is one of the factors which come in to the throughput of the drive. So yeah, 1 or 2 platters matters if you want fast even if you discount the influence of the platter count on the noise and reliability.

I used to use this for platter counts but it's probably not up to date:
http://rml527.blogspot.ch/2010/10/hdd-p ... ng-35.html
http://rml527.blogspot.ch/2010/10/hdd-p ... te-35.html

You should try a bit harder to find specs or get some training. On my first Google result, the first proeminent link was to this document containing relatively recent specs for Seagate's 7200 rpm drives: http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfile ... 1111us.pdf
From these specs, I can guarantee the ST1000DM003 has a 1T platter for instance. With current platter sizes, I think you should pick a 1T drive or a 500G, not a 750G by the way.

The most quiet 7200 rpm are obviously the 2.5'' but you probably don't want them.

Didn't SCPC review a pretty good 7200rpm Hitachi? Maybe I'm misremembering. In any case, look at the drive reviews!

Hehe. I was looking for the Samsung F3 platter size / count. But Google seems better then the Samsung site itself at finding them.

Google is usually the most straightforward way to find stuff on sites. You know the "site:badly-designed-site.com" shorthand, right?

The search features of a site are typically only useful if they've got a database you can search according to various criteria.

They no longer make the Samsung F3, F4. Samsung was bought by Seagate. I've still got mine and keeping it until it dies. I agree with you I don't see the hype concerning SSD there pathetically low capacity and high price makes them competely useless even as boot drive.

That’s a joke, right?

SSD speed destroys HDDs.

SSDs big enough for boot & key applications are easily affordable — e.g. highly-rated Crucial M4 64GB for $73 as of this post. You put all your data (music, movies, photos, old games) on a content HDD of your choosing, you get the best of both worlds.

So, let’s recap — you said “pathetically low capacity” — 64GB is way more than enough for OS, key applications, and system/program caches/databases. And that’s on the low end for SSD — these days, many people buy 240GB SSDs as a matter of course. You said “high price” — you seriously think $73 for a boot SSD on top of whatever you pay for a content HDD is a high price for one of the most dramatic speed improvements you can possibly make on a modern computer?

Pay up for a 240-256GB SSD for the system drive - believe me I was a skeptic at first, but the HD thrash upon the desktop showing went from a few minutes down to a few seconds on every reboot!!

I no longer dread reboots after updates and what not - I no longer bother sleeping the system, and just turn it off since booting up is so much faster!
I also put my temp folder back on the SSD OS drive, as well as a small fixed size (4GB) page file - system much snappier - Don't need anymore as 16GB of ram is so cheap now!

Life is too short to save a few $$$

SSD's are currently a mixed bag prices are falling a bit, capacity is increasing a bit.
IMO I do not find them appealing right now.

With a hefty price cut..maybe
It's not all about speed you know not for every use out there.
I appreciate the silent aspect, though SSD's are not a magic bullet either

I've got a normal HDD and I don't mind reboots either. I also just shut down the system, no SSD needed.

I really consider 64 gb to be too small for a primary volume and I dread reinstalling Windows.

Speed is not the main thing, multitasking is!
You can load 10 things at once on the SSD and not slow to a crawl, which is why it's so great for an OS drive. Put your pagefile and Temp folder there, and it doesn't flinch.

It would take seriously over a minute when the Windows desktop showed on a boot due to the HD thrash of all the apps loading at once....
On the SSD it's down to 3-5 second - boom, everything loads up together in a blink of the eye

When your trouble shooting things and doing lots of back to back reboots - the frustration saved is massive!!!
Oh yeah, storing your picture viewer thumbnails on the OS SSD is mighty nice too, especially when your thumbnail cache is over 1GB

SSD are pretty affordable right now. Even the slowest and cheapest SSD still has the super quick multitasking access time

Backing up my 130GB OS partition from a Samsung 1TB HD to a 2TB F4 used to take about 25-30mins at 85-100mb a second with standard compression, with the fastest software for such - Shadow Protect. The same from SSD to a 3Tb Seagate does it in 8-10mins at 150-160mb a second with high compression
So I actually back up more often and it's no longer annoying