still slower though

Unfortunate yes! They still produce 4200 rpm but use now mainly 5400 rpm and just a few 7200 rpm, for the 2.5" HDD for Laptops.

Still waiting for an high capacity SSD Drive!

Cheers.

Even the most expensive SSD drives are currently not very fast - fast for some things, like random read, dead slow for others, usually sequential/random write. I read some comparisons of $2000 64GB SSDs with regular laptop hard drives, and the results where very mixed. I am sure they'll fix this as they become mainstream, the potential is there. The SSD has near zero seek time, so that should be hugely faster. But as of now, it's not using that potential. And very expensive as well.

The sequential transfer rate for a 2.5" 5400 drive is good, at 50MB/s - but what kills performance completely is small random read/write, where it's an order of magnitude slower. My hardware monitor which is always on tells me that under ideal conditions, the 250GB 5400 drive gets 1MB/s average on operations that involve lots of small files. It ranges from a horrific 600KB/s to 2MB/s.

A lot has to do with the slow spindle speed, that's why 7200 RPM laptop drives are a lot faster. Much smaller access times make this better for the small read/write case. A typical system will have hundreds or thousands of files open for reading/writing so small random read/write is very important. The max. sequential transfer rate you only get in extreme cases like reading a large image file.

Another thing you need to consider is size: The HD gets the Maximum speed only at one end of the platter, the other end is half as fast or less. So if you fill up your HD to the brim, performance goes straight down the toilet. For optimal performance you need to keep it half empty.

A little excursion in the world of HD speeds ...