[striker100]

Reason I ask is the 4200rpm hard drive in my 1.5GHz Powerbook is pretty noisy to me. Can someone with the 5400rpm HD let me know if it's quiet?

[McFarmer]

Had a BTO 80GB 5400rpm drive in my 12" PowerBook.
This must have been the most silent drive I've ever had! Virtually inaudible. I was very pleased with the noise level.

Although the drive died after 7 months of usage... It was a Toshiba model.
The replacement drive Apple sent me is a Hitatchi 80GB 5400rpm. Go figure.

Although I did not go that route, I upgraded to a 100GB 5400rpm Seagate Momentus 5400.2 instead. Very quiet too. Nice.

Noise-wise go for 5400rpm drives. Although speed-wise they are not all that better than 4200rpm drives. You will hardly notice a difference.
From reports and tests on the web even the Hitatchi 7200rpm 60GB drive does not speed things up that drastically. Boot time speeds up by 1 second or so. File transfers are 10% faster, which of course is nice, but is that worth a 7200rpm drive?

In my book if in doubt go with a bigger size rather than a faster one. I'm happy I chose a 100GB 5400rpm drive over a 60GB 7200rpm one. Especially with the PowerBook's rather slow bus faster drives don't go that much faster anyway.

[TankCdr]

FWIW, I have a new 15 in with a 5400rpm drive and I have yet to hear in a week of using it heavily. It is much queter than the drived in my old 12 inch PB.

[tooki]

5400RPM drives are no louder than 4200RPM drives.

tooki