Hard drive rpm

[shakeyjake]

I'm looking to buy a new MacBook but can't decide which hard drive to go for. I'd like the extra space of the 120gb drive but it's 5400rmp speed is putting me off slightly.

Would I notice much of a difference in the speed? Does anyone have any past experiances?

Cheers!

 

[mad jew]

What do you use the computer for? For hard drive intensive tasks such as video and music production, the extra RPM will be noticeable and beneficial IMO.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Recently replaced 4200 with 7200.

As my post title states, I recently replaced a 4200 RPM drive (40 GB Toshiba) with a 7200 RPM drive (60 GB Hitachi.) This is on a Windows laptop, and in a Norton 'system benchmark' it scored about 10% faster. (That's 'full computer' speed. All other specs were the same, so the drive alone giving a 10% boost is pretty good. By comparison, replacing the 1.4GHz Celeron-M with a 2.26GHz Pentium-M gave it a full 50% boost.)

But, for 'everyday' tasks, it FEELS way faster. It boots faster, programs load faster, it's just overall more responsive.

This was going from 4200 to 7200, though. I've never had a 5400 RPM notebook drive, so I can't reasonably compare. I'd say you'll see SOME improvement, probably noticable, but not nearly as drastic as I did moving from 4200. Also, if you're getting the low-end model with 512MB of RAM, increasing that to 1 GB may give you an equal improvement in speed.

I ordered a 1.8GHz MBP with 1GB RAM and the 7200 RPM hard drive.

 

[shakeyjake]

I'm currently doing a media course, I'm not doing much video editing at the moment but that could change. Also I do have Logic Pro 7 and use that evey now and again.

From the sounds of it I guess I'd be better off with the faster drive??
Also, will the faster drive reduce battery life by much?

 

[MRU]

There's the rub.

A laptop drive at either 100 -120gb doesnt give you much space to capture either Audio or Video.

Added to the fact it's recommended that you filter out the system drive (dont use it at all to capture your work to), hence use scratch disk to increase performance and make data managment easier.

So if you are working with Logic or Final Cut Studio (hopefully they wil be Universal by then) you will really need a healthy sized Firewire 400 (800 would be nice but since that's been dropped) external hard disk drive.

This will be a 7200RPM drive anyway, so the only difference your laptop drive is going to make is in the extra 1-2 sec's it may take to start the application.

Save yourself the pennies, stick with the standard drive that comes with your machine and buy yourself a good external.

Also when installing Final Cut, choose custom install.. make sure you install the programmes to your internal drive, but all the templates and loops to the external (they use up about 25-30gb of space)...

 

[shakeyjake]

I've decided to go with the 100gb 7200rmp drive as i think the speed will benifical, cant afford an external right now but its something to consider in the future!

 

[dmw007]

I've decided to go with the 100gb 7200rmp drive as i think the speed will benifical, cant afford an external right now but its something to consider in the future!

I believe that you made the right choice shakeyjake, I would much rather have a 7,200 rpm HDD over a 5,400 rpm HDD in a MacBook Pro (that said, my iBook G4 only has a 4,200 rpm HDD... ).