external hard drive is actually an internal hard drive that is connected to a shell that converts the sata/ide to usb interface for easy connection. Thus every external hard drive has a different model that could be potentially from wd, seagate, hitachi...etc, so you do need to specify the model number for the information you need.
LaCie offers more than one external hard drive with 1TB of disk space. According to the product specifications on the LaCie website, most of the 1TB external hard drives have a rotational speed of 5400 per minute.
External hard drive prices vary depending on the size on the hard drive you want to purchase. The more storage space on the drive, the higher the price will be. They can be anywhere from $30 to $200.
7200 rpm is quite common.
Speed and size are the best friends of multimedia. You will want a 7200 rpm hard drive and the largest size (GBs) drive you can afford. If you want an external drive and have a FireWire connection on your computer, that is much more preferrable than USB due to its speed.
You can purchase an external hard drive from a variety of places, including retail and online stores. Most stores that sell electronics will have an external hard drives in many different sizes. Online stores, such as DiscounTechnology, also carry external hard drives. Prices vary depending on brand, model, and storage space of the external hard drive, though Sony recommends Seagate external Hard Drive due to it's higher compatibility than other external hard drives with the PlayStation 3 system. Be sure that when you buy one, you have one equal to or greater than the total capacity of your current PS3 to ensure that your data is transferred. If you do not have enough storage space, your data will not transfer at all.
An SAS hard drive has many high performance advantages over a SATA drive. The main thing that makes it better is the speed. A typical SATA drive operates at 7200 RPM, yet a typical SAS drive operates at 10,000 or 15,000 RPM.
RPM (Revolutions Per Minute)
The RPM of your hard drive. A 7000RPM drive is faster than a 5000RPM drive, and an SSD is faster than all Platter hard drives.
That is entirely dependent upon the speed of the hard drive, if the other hard drive has a higher RPM, or read/write time, then yes it will.
Currently the fastest speeds are 10000 rpm for most available Hard drives. This only generally indicates that a HDD is superior, although you'd not pick a 5400 rpm drive because it would be slow.
For internal hard drives, the highest I've seen being sold were up to 15000 RPM. Usually hard drives that come with computers pre-installed are at 7200 RPM so it's more than double that.
Macs only use standard hard drives such as the 7200-rpm Serial ATA hard drive found in many Macs.