Hi metazone21,
This isn't a product review board and is for PDR. I understand why you're asking.

I use external drives and find them ok BUT they do tend to have power saving capabilities and for video editing that's not good. I use a "wake up" software to ping the externals every 2 minutes.

Dafydd

Thanks for the reply. I’m very new at this and, compared to what I’ve seen in some tutorials, my current ambitions are extremely light. That said, I’m looking to make sure I incrementally purchase items that I can use when I eventually buy/build a new computer. I know that in the PD tests I’ve seen, the CPU/GPU are the main bottlenecks, with >= 7200 RPM storage not a major one; however, didn’t see any tests that used 5400 RPM HDDs for the drive for direct media input or the drive for production which is why I was wondering if, for my current use of PD, whether I could go with 5400 RPM HDDs for direct media input during a project’s production/rendering.

DETAILS AND MORE INFO (cut here):
Although the improvements in production speed seem minimal when comparing HDDs >= 7200 RPM or SSDs even for SVRT (one guy saw only a 5% improvement) it appears from recommendations that a high-end approach for improving speed in the storage area would be to have: 1) the OS and PD on a fast boot drive (SSD) - won’t improve production speed but will make for fast PD bootup; 2) my project’s media files on a separate drive (not boot drive); 3) separate fast drive for the results of producing. For #2 and #3, I’ve seen different recs – e.g. using SSD, using 7200 RPM is fine, others say use 10000 RPM. It looks like most say that a 7200 RPM is sufficient; I saw some say not to use 5400 RPM. Given the latter, I was intending to buy a 5400 RPM HDD for video storage and then, should I upgrade in the future to a ‘dream machine’, temporarily copy the media files to a faster drive when I create my PD project (PD support for re-locating media files is important).
In the interest of saving space, I was going to always just have a single copy of my video files (notwithstanding the temporary copy of them on the ‘fast media input’ drive when I’m working on a project). If I needed them in more than one project, I’d bring them in from the single location. I do see issues with this – e.g. working on more than one project at a time and, for good reason, this violates the good project management practices specified in here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAOnn8g0C_o&feature=youtu.be