External hard drive speed for backups and archiving

I'm planning to buy a pair of external FireWire hard drives to backup and archive my iBook G4. I've read a couple of product reports that compare read and write speed of hard drives which seems to be a function of each drive's rotational speed.
I then noticed that my iBook's internal hard drive is slower (at 4200 RPM) than either of the external drives I'm now considering (7200 RPM and 5400 RPM). A test report I read showed the 7200 RPM drive duplicating 1GB twice as fast as the 5400 RPM drive when connected via FireWire to a G5.
Will my slower internal hard drive limit the speed of duplication so that there is little or no advantage to the 7200 RPM drive over the 5400 RPM drive for me?
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Probably should have been clearer in my initial question. The 7200 RPM drive I'm looking at is a desktop model, and a bit cheaper than the 5400 RPM drive, which is portable. I like the smaller footprint of the portable drive (and the convenience of it being bus powered) but don't want to pay more for those benefits only to be disappointed with its performance.
So, I'm actually trying to decide between a higher speed/lower cost/desktop vs. lower speed/higher cost/portable. If I could determine that the actual performance difference between these was not very significant when used solely to backup and archive my iBook, I'd gladly pay a bit more for the convenience and small size of the portable.
If there indeed is a big performance difference, I'd find space on my desk for the desktop drive and pocket the savings.

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