Questions for PS3 owners and A/V geeks (reconsidering buying)

[Aeni]

There won't be any noticeable improvement from upgrading to a 7200rpm HDD. I asked a Resistance dev on NeoGAF and I think the simplified version for idiots like me was that the games are programmed to load on a 5200rpm speed and won't see any advantage...or something like that.

Yes, that's correct, the game performance in itself will not improve in the least. However, the application loading into system ram as well as data that is being transferred (either from online or any other external source) will see a performance increase upgrading to 7200 RPM (i.e., the amount of time it takes for the data to be transferred) Having a larger cache on the HDD unit itself will improve the performance a lot more.