Will a 7200 RPM drive boost speed for Beige G3?

I currently have an old 8 GB IDE hard drive in mmy G3 AIO, but am thinking of a bigger (doesn't need to be really big) drive, 7200 RPM, 8 MB buffer. Without buying an ATA 133 card, will this drive significantly improve hard drive read/ write speed over the old ATA drive that's in there now (probably 5400 RPM) when connecting it to the system IDE bus?

The 7200 RPM drive's faster rotational speed does seem to make a noticeable difference, in spite of the slow IDE bus speed and the 66 MHz system bus speed. In addition to the larger cache, newer drives run more quietly and cooler than the older, slower models. When it's ON, my (convection-cooled) iMac 400 is practically silent, with its new 80 GB/7200 RPM drive. I started upgrading my beige G3s with larger capacity (7200 RPM) drives, when "larger" meant 10, 15, and 30 GBs. After upgrading my desktop and mini-tower models, the only audible noise was from the power supplies' cooling fans, which had previously gone unnoticed, because the main source of noise was from the original hard drives. If you check your local electronics, computer, and office supply stores' sales this week, you should be able to find a 120-160 GB drive for less than 50¢/GB. This week, Best Buy has the Seagate 160 GB (PATA or SATA) drive on sale for $69.99 (no rebate required). Although your AIO won't recognize the full capacity a 160 GB drive, it may cost less than what you'd pay for a 120 GB drive. At the retail level, I doubt you'd find anything smaller than 80 GBs now.

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    Message was edited by: solsun

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    Hi, don't know if this will really answer your question but my new MBP just arrived Monday with a 100GB, 7200 RPM drive. I definitely notice the improvement in access time. Noise? I cannot tell the difference, its as quiet as a mouse. Drawing a bit more power but it is negligble. If you can swing it, I would recommend the 7200...Too bad you can't order it in a larger drive size though. 120 would have been nice
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    Message was edited by: Petermgr

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    check out this web site.
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