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HD cache can be used where the IDE buffer on your system gets tangled up. When you are accessing larger files, there are times when the data transfer path of your system gets clogged. This can cause a bouncing of your HDD spinning faster and slower and degrades overall performance. This is especially true with PATA (not sure how it effects SATA) if multiple drives on the same channel are being used. The performance gain is often minimal, but the gain grows as the cache gets larger.
As for RPMs/seek time... well, the bottleneck, again, is the ATA/IDE pathway, not the drive itself (past 7,200 RPMs that is). Seek time increases greatly with higher platter speeds and is really limited primarily BY rotational speed. Throughput has many other limitations. This faster seek time is important for "speed critical" applications like large databases or public web sites (like /.) that get a lot of hits.
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