[Future Snake Eater]

"To make the hard drive spin faster (increase speed) or to add capacity doesn't really add a lot of incremental cost to the drive."

Hmmm...according to Newegg.com, the WD 300GB Velociraptor is $230 and a there's a WD 1TB for $105. Looks like making it spin faster adds quite a bit to the cost. Either that or we're being ripped off.

[John Valentine]

Looks like making it spin faster adds quite a bit to the cost.

Looks like making it spin faster adds quite a bit to the price.

Supply and demand is what's at play here. People obviously will pay substantially more for a 10,000 rpm drive. I have a friend who populated his computer with 4 200 some-odd gig 10,000 rpm drives. I populated my identical computer with four 750 gig Western Digital 7500 rpm drives. I wasn't interested in paying the premium for the marginal improvement in data transfer rate; he was.

Neither of us was "ripped off".

[r9etb]

Looks like making it spin faster adds quite a bit to the cost. Either that or we're being ripped

There'd be a cost impact for the higher-speed read/write aspects of the drive, but once you've achieved the speed there would be very little additional cost associated with adding storage capacity; and most of the underlying hardware would be identical regardless of speed.