Yes, you can. You can buy a separate SSD and put it into an MBP or MB.
This evening I upgraded the 5400 120 gig drive with a 200 gig 7200 Hitachi drive.
WOW, this thing is fast!
BTW, the upgrade is pretty easy. Just don't mix up the screws and you're in business.
Macworld just made a test:
"Another optional feature, the 200GB, 7,200-rpm hard drive, proved to be a big help in our disk-intensive tests. For example, the customized MacBook Pro was 14 percent faster than the standard 2.5GHz system when unzipping a compressed 2GB file and 22 percent faster when duplicating a 1GB folder in the Finder. A faster hard drive will definitely help when copying and manipulating large files and folders, or if your system is running low on memory or working on projects too big to held in memory. The downside to this 7,200-rpm option is, of course, its lower capacity than the 250GB drive that comes standard on the MacBook Pro as well as its $50 boost to your price tag."
http://www.macworld.com/article/132600/2008/03/mbpro_bto.html
I've posted this before but I went from a 100GB 7200 drive to a 320GB 5400 drive (Samsung) and my computer is actually faster than it was before. It all depends on what you need it for I guess, but my guess is that the highest capacity 5400 drives will be about as fast as the 7200 drives...the 7200 drives will have an advantage but probably not that much.
hands down 7200rpm unless you only care about storage (but thats what external hdd is for)
Yah, some of my more computer geek buddies said it was worth it.. So I'm gonna go for it. Rather pay some extra cash than constantly be thinking, I wish I had that 7200rpm drive
I've posted this before but I went from a 100GB 7200 drive to a 320GB 5400 drive (Samsung) and my computer is actually faster than it was before. It all depends on what you need it for I guess, but my guess is that the highest capacity 5400 drives will be about as fast as the 7200 drives...the 7200 drives will have an advantage but probably not that much.
That's comparing apples to oranges.
Your 100GB 7200RPM drive was a few generations old, and the new 320GB 5400 Drive is brand new...
If you'd put a NEW 7200RPM state of the art drive in your machine that had an OLD 5400RPM drive in it... the difference would have been even that much more.
As platters get denser, the throughput increases.
So you can't compare 5400/7200 RPM drives from different drive generations... only CURRENT generations.