Which MacBook Pro hard drive dilemma?

Chic0

Chic0

aka Norman Gah
Hi

I have searched the forum but cannot find any threads reagrding this.

I am looking at replacing my Powerbook and buying a MacBook Pro 15". Looking at the hard drive options on Apple site, I can either go for the 160gb 7200rpm drive or the 200gb 4200rpm drive.

I would prefer to have the bigger storage option, but as there is a significant difference in drive speed, would I notice the difference?

I mainly use my laptop for playing music, browsing web and using Adobe Photoshop for little things, nothing major. I also ocassionally use it for backing up some dvds and converting them to watch on my ipod.

Bearing all this in mind, do you think I would greatly benefit from opting for the faster drive?

Thanks in advance

C
 
Chic0 said:
Hi

I have searched the forum but cannot find any threads reagrding this.

I am looking at replacing my Powerbook and buying a MacBook Pro 15". Looking at the hard drive options on Apple site, I can either go for the 160gb 7200rpm drive or the 200gb 4200rpm drive.

I would prefer to have the bigger storage option, but as there is a significant difference in drive speed, would I notice the difference?

I mainly use my laptop for playing music, browsing web and using Adobe Photoshop for little things, nothing major. I also ocassionally use it for backing up some dvds and converting them to watch on my ipod.

Bearing all this in mind, do you think I would greatly benefit from opting for the faster drive?

Thanks in advance

C
Click to expand...


Is it 7200 rpm or 5400 rpm. The difference in capacity is small, but a 'large' drives. A faster drive will increases disk access (loading programs, reading / writing files, booting the system). I would choose the faster drive as capacity is not an issue for me personal, but speed is. If you leave the downloaded stuff on your drive after using / converting it, the bigger capacity might be interesting, but that will give you only a few more downloads before the drive will be full.


Good luck, Kees
 
Yeah I see what you mean.

The Apple site offers you two 160gb drives. One is 5400rpm and the other 7200rpm. There is also the slower 200gb option.

The main reason I would opt for the bigger capacity is mainly because of my huge and ever increasing music collection. Currently I have 93gb of music on my Powerbook. This is ok as I have the 120gb drive in it, but I only have about 5gb of space to play with. I have an external HD to backup my music collection and store movies and other things on.

I thought about the option of maybe storing my music on the larger external HD ,but it's not idea lwit ha laptop. I currently play my music using Airport Express, so I dont want to have to have my external HD connected everytime I want to play music. Defeats the portability of a laptop IMO.

Do you know of any sites that have benchmarks for these kinda of things? Maybe some speed tests of a 160gb 7200rpm and a 200gb 4200rpm drive?

hhhmmmmm decisions
 
Hello Chic0
There is a table on this page which lists the differences between 4200 vs 5400 vs 7200. It would seem the differences are quite small, though there are plenty of people who will argue there is a very noticable difference, and you should always go with a 7200 when available.

I myself bought a 7200 for my MacBook Pro. I have nothing to compare it to, of course. I know people who have 5400 who complain of similar heat issues, so I don't think it produces much more heat than a 5400.

There is aforum post on notebookreview.com on which someone seems to confirm the findings of the table I mentioned earlier. He believes the difference is noticable:

I upgraded about two months ago from an 80GB 5400RPM SATA drive to a 100GB 7200RPM. I am noticing the difference - boot-up is improved by about ten seconds, and game loading time is faster. Defragmenting is faster, and so is opening up programs and transferring data - all noticable differences, but nothing that will jump out at you.

Is it a a big difference? Not a huge one. My laptop is my primary machine, so I like to have it as fast as possible. The 7200RPM drive was worth it for me. On the whole, I would say the performance increase was about 10-15%, perhaps 20% in some cases.
Click to expand...

I personally would go for a 7200, but I think you will be perfectly happy with a 5400rpm.Do you plan on using the MBP for games at all? this is where a 7200rpm really does come in handy, because games require a lot of small bits of data to be loaded constantly, which is where seek time becomes important.
 
By any chance do you listen to all 93 gb all the time? Because if you don't actually use ll of your music, you could consider getting an external drive.

Here's a random question: I think I saw somewere that most SCSI drives can go over 7200rpm and even 10000rpm, is this true?
 
Chic0 - you should keep 15% free space on your drive, otherwise you have a chance of data corruption/loss or drive failure.
 
Thank The Cheese said:
I personally would go for a 7200, but I think you will be perfectly happy with a 5400rpm.Do you plan on using the MBP for games at all? this is where a 7200rpm really does come in handy, because games require a lot of small bits of data to be loaded constantly, which is where seek time becomes important.
Click to expand...

cheers for the info. I checked out that link. Seems there is about 5 secs difference in performance between 4200 and 7200. Thing is, its not as if I will be opening big apps up or running anything major. I suppose main thing I use it for is playing music and browsing. Yes I do use Adobe just for basic things........

Hmmmm.....still bit tricky. I wont be upgrading till another 5-6months, so have plenty time to make my mind up :-D
Who knows, they may even revise it and make a faster 200gb drive available ;-)

IcemanJC, yeah I know what you mean. Nah I dont really listen to all 93gb in one go, but just nice having the option where if I do go anywhere, I can sync/play whatever I like and am not limited. I have been trimming down my collection over last few months. Some stuff on there which I never listened to or didnt think was all that, so I just got rid.

Bobw, I didnt realise that kinda thing could happen with low disk space.

I definately think storage is more important to me than speed tho. I mean with way I use my laptop, am I really gonna notice those few seconds...

Thanks guys
 
I think also if you go below 15% of disk space left, your computer starts to slow down.
 
icemanjc said:
I think also if you go below 15% of disk space left, your computer starts to slow down.
Click to expand...

Yeah already noticed that on my powerbook as only have 5gb free :-( I just never realised it could potentially mean loss of data. Just gonna have to make sure I regularly do backups onto my external HD until I upgrade.
 
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