A:Answer WD does not claim a specific speed to this drive however they say it's comparable to a 7200rpm drive, It is considered by WD (western digital) to have their "Intellipower" technology.
Long story short, The average consumer will not notice a difference between this and a 7200 rpm drive.
See their website explaination: https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=3892
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WD IntelliPower drives comparisons vs. traditional 7,200 RPM drives
Overall, this product meets the performance requirements of most applications while delivering significantly less power consumption. If your application requires mostly sequential read/writes, then the drive will perform comparable to a 7,200 RPM drive. However, if your application performs mostly random mode operations, then the performance may drop by about 10% because of the latency time. If the IntelliPower product does not meet your performance needs then we have our Enterprise Edition line of 7,200 RPM Enterprise drives that will deliver the performance you need at the industry’s best reliability.
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