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difference between 5400 and 7200 rpm in regards to opening media and documents

S

shanimal

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 12, 2011
89
0
would it be a good idea to (if i can) crack open my 750 gb WD My Passport HDD and put it in the optical bay of my Macbook Pro instead of 500gb hdd that i have now? the 500gb hdd i have now is 7200rpm and the WD is 5400rpm. from what i gather, if you have a ssd and a hdd in your laptop you would put your OS and apps on the sdd and everything else on the hdd. would i notice a speed difference if im listening to music (or watching movies) off the 5400rpm rather than a 7200rpm? Since my computer has to read it off the hdd and play it with itunes (or quicktime) on the ssd, is that going to be a problem (same thing with documents like .pages or .txt, will i have a problem if the document itself it on the hdd but the app is on the sdd)?

What i was thinking of doing is partitioning 128gb of space on my optical bay drive for CCCloner since the ssd im getting is only that big, and the rest would be for everything else so i just wanted to get as much space as i can. it would cool if i could stop plugging in my external drive for backups.

Is there anything else that should go on the SSD instead of the HDD besides OS and apps?
 
There is a neglibible difference if any at all in sequential speed. Actually a 1TB 5400rpm drive is given the same amount of data faster than a 750GB 7200rpm if all you do is copy movie files and music around and other big files (big is >2MB). A drive gets slower the more it gets to the end to the inner tracks and a 7200rpm which is on the smaller inner tracks already is slower than a only half full 5400rpm drive on faster tracks.

As for play back it makes no difference at all. A common high def mkv (4.5GB movie) is some 6-8 mbits which is 1MB/s a extremely high def 30GB bluray movie is 18-30Mb/s (4MB/s). Compare that to the 110-60 MB/s that a hdd can read back.
Audio is no different.
For a media and backup drive 7200rpm is only noise without any benefit at all.
 
ok cool, thanks for the replies. i opened my external hdd but it looks like it wouldnt fit. even though is says its Serial ATA it looks funny. oh well.
 
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