there is this person, let's say he is my sister (he's actually just a friend)
my, sister; is nagging me,
because i have a 7200 HDD and my sister's one is 5400; and she says, only 7200rpm can record without the following problems:
samll gaps in between the recordings (about a 1/4 second gaps per 2 seconds)
the recording only shows up that it is recording after 1/2 s
bad audio?( he doesn't tell me what is wrong)
i really want him to buy not an apple because it is supposdly (best "bang" for the buck for beginner's recording) i mean seriously, he doesn't even know that mp3 has different kbps and doesn't know what a .flac is..
i told him to research, and he said "yeah! i've done the research on it for a day!; and it tells me to buy an apple" (says on the apple sites)
and by my estimate from the past experiences, he would want to buy a new one by the end of the year; i mean, he does it everyday, so it cannot be a bad computer (the one i would recommend) but it doesn't have to be an apple
Rpm of a drive is important up to a point it depends on what you are recording at what the res and fps it is at. To record a 1080p video from my limited experience you need at least around 60Mb write. So a 5000 decent rpm hdd can do 60md write so you would be fine with a 5000. How ever if you are wanting to do something such as 4k video recording you would want to look in to ssd's for that. AS for the problem you said about i don't under stand how having a higher rpm drive would cause that to happen all higher rpm means is usally faster write or better iops etc.
ps; what will you be recording ? gameplay,Video,audio or something else ?
It can and it does. The faster the spindle spins, the faster the drive can write and read data. Depending on quality of the video being worked with, a modern 5400RPM can do the trick, but not really recommended, and higher end video recording and editing use fairly large RAID arrays to keep up with the sustained writes. If recording in HD, I'd recommend at least a modern 7200RPM. Those problems you mentioned do happen if the drive can't provide fast enough sustained writes.
I agree that Apple is not at all a good value, but the higher end MBPro's do have PCI-e SSD's, which are much faster than any mechanical drive and most consumer SSD's.
For audio, don't even worry about it unless you're recording a shitton of tracks at once. I think your "sister" just really wants to justify buying an Apple. Feel free to try to talk some sense into him, but it looks like he's already made up his mind.
I had a "Sister" like that a couple of months ago. I had him pick out the mac that he wanted and I built a PC for half the price that does the same thing. Like TomAwesome said, as long as you aren't recording a bunch of tracks at the same time I can't see it having any trouble at all. Most of the time it's beneficial to record one track at a time (provided you're recording analog) to get the acoustics of the room right and to avoid unwanted noise in your tracks.