15" 2.33 Ghz Core2Duo MacBook Pro - Hard Drive Question

Hi all,

I need to upgrade my laptop and am giving serious consideration to moving away from a windows laptop system and purchasing the 15" 2.33 Ghz Core2Duo MacBook Pro.

Does anyone any feedback to share on the performance of the 200 gig 4200rpm hard drive vs the 160 gig 5400rpm HD? I'll likely load it with 3 GB of ram.

Cheers, Jett

The faster drive will be a minor benefit if you are moving large files around a lot, but I don't find the 4200 RPM drive in my MacBook to be all that limiting. If you were going to get a speed AND space benefit I would say go for it, but I'm not all that sure that the speed benefit alone justifies a significant cost.

Now if only Seagate would make a 200 GB, 7200 RPM Momentus drive, I'd be a happy camper.

If you want a real screamer of a drive for a MacBook, you might want to consider this little beauty. $109 before shipping from NewEgg. Pity it's only 100 GB.

It's not Seagate, but Samsung makes a 200GB 7200 rpm drive.

http://www.applelinks.com/index.php/more/s...ard_disk_drive/

I think I'd rather have a 250GB 5400 rpm drive though.

http://laptoping.com/250gb-5400rpm-laptop-...es-25-inch.html

Drives get faster as they get bigger regardless of spindle speed. I would wager they 160GB 5400 rpm drive overall is as fast as the 100GB 7200 one. I'd take the extra capacity and power savings over the faster spindle in a notebook, though not in the case of the 200GB 4200 rpm drive. It's not enough bigger to pay the performance price.

The best way to get high performance, when you need it, is to hang a full size 3.5 inch, 7200rpm drive externally, on the firewire 800 port. That leaves the internal drive free to run the system and app, and leaves the data drive spinning fast with your images or video.

So for me, I always go for the biggest internal drive possible regardless of speed, just for the convenience of having as much as possible (like both my aperture archive and my itunes library) at my fingertips, on the plane, at work, whenever I want it, without needing an external drive. Until I really settle in to work and need speed, size, backups, etc.

The best way to get high performance, when you need it, is to hang a full size 3.5 inch, 7200rpm drive externally, on the firewire 800 port. That leaves the internal drive free to run the system and app, and leaves the data drive spinning fast with your images or video.

 

So for me, I always go for the biggest internal drive possible regardless of speed, just for the convenience of having as much as possible (like both my aperture archive and my itunes library) at my fingertips, on the plane, at work, whenever I want it, without needing an external drive. Until I really settle in to work and need speed, size, backups, etc.

Actually the faster external way would be to buy the La Cie Little Big Disk. With 2 striped 160GB 2.5" 5400rpm disks running on buspower, you can get up to 45MB/s write which is as fast as the internal drive. And it's smaller than a 3.5" external drive.

I have the internal 200GB installed now. I had the 160GB but decided more space was better. Performance wise you wouldn't notice the difference unless you sat there with a stopwatch.

If you are not in a rush, I'd wait for Revision 3 and the ability to install 4GB of ram. Right now the MBP has a limit of 3GB, which is only adequate for Aperture and Photoshop.