It seems that on balance I'd be better off getting a 5400 drive in the interests of battery life and investing in more ram if I want better day-to-day performance.
Buy a ton of memory to solve the beach ball problem. If you open so many apps, you will use up the memory and start virtual memory swapping (which is slow regardless of what drive you get, hard drives are slow across the board compared to RAM).
I totally agree. Plenty of RAM will always help, laptop or desktop.
I use two Dual 2 GHz G5s, one at home and one at the office. The office one was not my purchase and thus has far less RAM, 1 GB versus the 2.5 GB I have at home. And I notice a significant difference between the two systems even when I only had 1.5 GB at home!
Also, regarding the HDs, its nice that drive spec comparisons are listed on that site. While it will place more of a strain on the battery I still think I'd go with the 7200 RPM drive especially since it makes practically the same amount of noise. Obviously if I could get a fast capacious drive I'd go that route.
my honest apologies. In re-reading my own post, it did come across as b1tchy, and I _really_ didn't mean that. It's just the kind of thing where we can all make judgement calls, sway you one way or the other, and then if you're not happy we look/feel bad, when really the important thing is that you make the right decision for you, based on your judgements. Obviously I should've been less kurt in my response.
And in reading through the thread it looks like you did get some good advice. My impression from reviews I've read is that there's little advantage in speed when going with 7200rpm vs. 5400rpm. And as mentioned the 7200rpm drives do tend to use more power and generate more heat.
Again, my sincere apologies for coming across so snippy.
I'd opt for the 7200 rpm drive. In my experience, HD speed is a huge factor in OS X performance, especially if you tend to run lots of apps at once and use lots of memory. Doesn't matter how much physical RAM you have - OS X will be paging out and in and a 5400 rpm drive seems to be a big performance hit.
I use both an 800 MHz iMac G4 with a 5400 RPM drive, and a Powermac G4 "Sawtooth" 400 MHz tower with a 7200 RPM drive. The iMac does a few things faster, and I've measured higher frame rates in Quake 3A, for example, but in real world use my Sawtooth just feels faster. Not a scientific comparison, but a representative anecdote of the importance of HD performance IMO.
Sorry, I don't have any benchmarks for you, all I'm offering is my own experience and opinion.
Want to know what I'd do if it were my MacBook Pro? I'd buy it with the cheapest HD option, then buy a compatible after-market 7200 rpm drive with boku capacity and install that sucker myself. It would cost less than Apple's BTO BS, and while installing the HD I'd put in my own RAM.
Want to know what I'd do if it were my MacBook Pro? I'd buy it with the cheapest HD option, then buy a compatible after-market 7200 rpm drive with boku capacity and install that sucker myself. It would cost less than Apple's BTO BS, and while installing the HD I'd put in my own RAM.
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I was thinking that also... when they come with the 250gb 7200 rpm ... but voids your waranty right ?
I'm with JD on the 7200. When we added a faster drive to our older iMac it made a noticeable difference. We already had a gig of memory.
But these particular two drives are not that different in speed. If you went from a 4500 rpm or 5400 rpm small drive to a 7200 rpm big drive then I could see a difference.
My advice is to go with the 7200 rpm hard disk. Although they tend to draw a little more power in operation they are also faster at reading and writing which means that disk operations will be finished faster and that somewhat compensates as far as power is concerned. And yes there is a definitive difference with regards to performance. Hard disks are often a significant bottleneck in your system and the faster they are the better. If I were to buy a MacBook Pro today, I would have opted for the significantly faster but slightly smaller 7200 rpm hard disk.
Also, with regards to performance, it is important that the hard disk comes with (at least) 8 Mb cache memory. But I think that that is true of all 5400 and 7200 rpm hard disks on the market today.
These are great articles, but on saterday i ordered my macbook pro 1,8ghz with 2gb ram and i ordered 120mb 5400rpm.. i'm to scared of the drain of the battery life...anyways, if after some years we have 250g 7200rpm or whatever comes out, i still can switch the hd myselfs.. i dont think that will be to hard to do it.. for me the 20gb extra i will use if eventually i run also windows in dual boot on it, or some linux distro.. (windows at one time WILL run on it, we all now that :-))
Baaed on everthing I've read, I've gone with the 100GB 7200RPM drive - While the additional 20GB would be nice, since I really use my laptop as a desktop most of the time - i.e. it's powered, I'm not too concerned about a slightly lower battery life and the responiveness of the system when handling large files (>2GB i.e. using virtual memory a lot) is more important to me.
Others I suspect will come to different decisions based on their own usage patterns - basically, there is no one size fits all.
thanks for this thread, guys. it reminds me why AI is a nice place to hang around, where people don't flip their lids every time someone asks a question that has been answered, but treat each other with respect (generally, though even I am guilty of an infraction here and there).
speaking for myself, i've never really been able to tell the difference in 5400 vs. 7200 drives in day to day stuff, but i'm not a very intensive user usually, either
Isn't density a factor? That is, a 120GB drive is faster than a 60GB one, all other things being equal because the data is more tightly packed and therefore the drive can make more use of potential bandwidth.
I would go for the 120GB 5400RPM drive over the 100GB 7200 rpm drive; the faster spinning drive will only be a little faster than the larger one -- not nearly the margin it would hold over a 100GB 5400RPM drive.
I recall when the GHz TiBook first came out that the 60GB 4200RPM drives were quite substantially faster than 40GB drives at the same speed.
I didn't think about the partial improvement in speed when upgrading from the 100 GB to 120 GB 5400 RPM drive. It should be about the same power and noise, just a bit faster due to the increased density of the platters.
Perhaps a good compromise between performance and battery life?
Comments
It seems that on balance I'd be better off getting a 5400 drive in the interests of battery life and investing in more ram if I want better day-to-day performance.
Originally posted by e1618978
Buy a ton of memory to solve the beach ball problem. If you open so many apps, you will use up the memory and start virtual memory swapping (which is slow regardless of what drive you get, hard drives are slow across the board compared to RAM).
I totally agree. Plenty of RAM will always help, laptop or desktop.
I use two Dual 2 GHz G5s, one at home and one at the office. The office one was not my purchase and thus has far less RAM, 1 GB versus the 2.5 GB I have at home. And I notice a significant difference between the two systems even when I only had 1.5 GB at home!
Also, regarding the HDs, its nice that drive spec comparisons are listed on that site. While it will place more of a strain on the battery I still think I'd go with the 7200 RPM drive especially since it makes practically the same amount of noise. Obviously if I could get a fast capacious drive I'd go that route.
Originally posted by e1618978
Here are comparisons between the two drives that I think are probably in there (somebody correct me if I am wrong):
http://www.silentpcreview.com/Sectio...artid-264.html
http://www.silentpcreview.com/Sectio...artid-278.html
The 7200 rpm drive is slightly faster, and uses 20% more power, with the same noise level.
I would go with the 120gb drive myself.
Thanks for the excellent articles, i will go for the 120gb drive!! defnitly now... and 2 gig ram should be enough for some years on my macbook...
the macbook doesn't seem to have the great battery life we thought it would so adding more power guzzling specs wont help
my honest apologies. In re-reading my own post, it did come across as b1tchy, and I _really_ didn't mean that. It's just the kind of thing where we can all make judgement calls, sway you one way or the other, and then if you're not happy we look/feel bad, when really the important thing is that you make the right decision for you, based on your judgements. Obviously I should've been less kurt in my response.
And in reading through the thread it looks like you did get some good advice. My impression from reviews I've read is that there's little advantage in speed when going with 7200rpm vs. 5400rpm. And as mentioned the 7200rpm drives do tend to use more power and generate more heat.
Again, my sincere apologies for coming across so snippy.
I use both an 800 MHz iMac G4 with a 5400 RPM drive, and a Powermac G4 "Sawtooth" 400 MHz tower with a 7200 RPM drive. The iMac does a few things faster, and I've measured higher frame rates in Quake 3A, for example, but in real world use my Sawtooth just feels faster. Not a scientific comparison, but a representative anecdote of the importance of HD performance IMO.
Sorry, I don't have any benchmarks for you, all I'm offering is my own experience and opinion.
Want to know what I'd do if it were my MacBook Pro? I'd buy it with the cheapest HD option, then buy a compatible after-market 7200 rpm drive with boku capacity and install that sucker myself. It would cost less than Apple's BTO BS, and while installing the HD I'd put in my own RAM.
If you want to find some good hardware tests and reader reviews, then check out the articles at Accelerate Your Mac and their database of reader hardware reviews.
Originally posted by Junkyard Dawg
I'
Want to know what I'd do if it were my MacBook Pro? I'd buy it with the cheapest HD option, then buy a compatible after-market 7200 rpm drive with boku capacity and install that sucker myself. It would cost less than Apple's BTO BS, and while installing the HD I'd put in my own RAM.
[/url]
I was thinking that also... when they come with the 250gb 7200 rpm ... but voids your waranty right ?
Originally posted by sternone
I was thinking that also... when they come with the 250gb 7200 rpm ... but voids your waranty right ?
I believe so. Good reason not to buy a 1st revision MacBook Pro.
Originally posted by concentricity
...my honest apologies...
Don't worry about it, must have been an off-day :-P
Originally posted by Junkyard Dawg
I'd opt for the 7200 rpm drive...
Dammit, just when I thought we had a consensus :-)
Originally posted by kcmac
I'm with JD on the 7200. When we added a faster drive to our older iMac it made a noticeable difference. We already had a gig of memory.
But these particular two drives are not that different in speed. If you went from a 4500 rpm or 5400 rpm small drive to a 7200 rpm big drive then I could see a difference.
Also, with regards to performance, it is important that the hard disk comes with (at least) 8 Mb cache memory. But I think that that is true of all 5400 and 7200 rpm hard disks on the market today.
Why 7200 RPM Mobile Hard Disk Drives?
Hitachi 7200RPM Notebook Drive versus the rest
Fast And Furious: Notebooks vs. Battery Life Drain
Originally posted by Nautical
Here are some useful webpages on this topic:
Why 7200 RPM Mobile Hard Disk Drives?
Hitachi 7200RPM Notebook Drive versus the rest
Fast And Furious: Notebooks vs. Battery Life Drain
These are great articles, but on saterday i ordered my macbook pro 1,8ghz with 2gb ram and i ordered 120mb 5400rpm.. i'm to scared of the drain of the battery life...anyways, if after some years we have 250g 7200rpm or whatever comes out, i still can switch the hd myselfs.. i dont think that will be to hard to do it.. for me the 20gb extra i will use if eventually i run also windows in dual boot on it, or some linux distro.. (windows at one time WILL run on it, we all now that :-))
Others I suspect will come to different decisions based on their own usage patterns - basically, there is no one size fits all.
speaking for myself, i've never really been able to tell the difference in 5400 vs. 7200 drives in day to day stuff, but i'm not a very intensive user usually, either
I would go for the 120GB 5400RPM drive over the 100GB 7200 rpm drive; the faster spinning drive will only be a little faster than the larger one -- not nearly the margin it would hold over a 100GB 5400RPM drive.
I recall when the GHz TiBook first came out that the 60GB 4200RPM drives were quite substantially faster than 40GB drives at the same speed.
I didn't think about the partial improvement in speed when upgrading from the 100 GB to 120 GB 5400 RPM drive. It should be about the same power and noise, just a bit faster due to the increased density of the platters.
Perhaps a good compromise between performance and battery life?