10,000 rpm hdd

If you have a 15" MBP, the maximum height of 2.5" HDDs it can take is 9.5mm, if it is a 17" MBP, it is 12.5mm, the velociraptor has a height of 15mm.

Better get an SSD, but know, that your MBP only has an S-ATA 1.5 Gbps interface, limiting you to 148MB/s as transfer rate.

steiney said:

Hello All,

I am seriously considering purchasing a Western Digital VelociRaptor, due to it's 10,000 RPM speed. I'm looking to get the best hard drive speed I can, without bumping up to an SSD and spending the big bucks.

1. Will my MBP 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo (Mid-2007) be able to take full advantage of the fast spin rate, or will I be wasting money on such a fast drive?

2. Does anyone have any positive or negative experiences with the VelociRaptor line?

3. How important is cache? The VelociRaptor has 16MB, which is the highest I've seen in the 2.5 variety.

Thanks in advance for any help!

steiney

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Do you have any idea how much power, noise and easy to damage if it gets bumped a 10k RPM drive is?

Uses too much power (12v vs. 5v), too much noise (it's 10k RPM!)...

Don't try it

PS it is too big to fit, it is 15mm

steiney said:

Yeah, after posting this, I found out that the drive is too thick and won't fit in the MBP. Bummer. I just want a fast drive and don't want to pay for an SSD. I will probably settle for a 500 GB 7200 RPM.

spinnerlys: Are you saying that the motherboard on my edition of the MBP can only handle transfers of 1.5 Gbps, and therefore won't be able to take full advantage of the SSD speed? If so, would it be able to take full advantage of a 7200 drive?

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Yes, it would bottleneck the SSD, but you would be able to easily take advantage of a 7200 RPM disk.

Two years ago I replaced the default 80Gb 5400rpm Toshiba HD of my 1.83Ghz CD with a 200Gb WD 7200rpm, and boy, could I see the difference!

However, since your machine might have to be changed in a year or two, perhaps you could take something that you can then re-install in a new machine -> SSD.

just get a 7200 rpm hard drive.

Seriously, how much on-board space do you need? I would be willing to bet that for most people with a 500+ gb HD on a laptop (including me) much of it is rarely used data.

If speed + size is critical, get a small SSD, remove the optical drive and put a secondary HD there.

Seagate momentus xt! Best/fastest drive for the price.

steiney said:

2. Does anyone have any positive or negative experiences with the VelociRaptor line?

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I came to Mac from machines that had Velociraptors installed, and I was there when we moved from the former 7200 drives to the Velociraptors.

I have nothing bad to say about them. They were speedy and reliable.

However...you are not going to see ANYthing like the kind of improvement that you will see when you move from ANY spinning hard drive to an SSD.

You mentioned spending "big bucks" but I am afraid that after you spend the money on Velociraptors and notice hardly any difference, you're going to end up thinking that the money you did spend was "wasted bucks" because it's still going to be the bottle neck in your performance figures.

The single thing that holds us all back is reading the hard drive.

On my iMac, I have a spinning drive because I wanted to run both Windows and OSX on what was a default large drive, and because the best deal was an iMac refurb with a spinner. I get around it fairly effectively most of the time by just keeping my most often used applications open on either the virtual machine or OSX, supported by 16 GB of RAM.

My MacBook with the SSD, however, just blows all of this into the weeds and it's a very, very clear advantage to anything else when you have an SSD.

So...I have nothing bad to say about Velociraptors except that it's not going to get you anywhere close to an SSD.

EDIT: I see that a conclusion has been reached and intelligent comments made while I was typing this!!

steiney said:

So, now I'm looking at 7200 RPM drives, and I don't see any with a cache larger than 16MB, other than the Seagate Momentus, which is a hybrid. I read some reviews of that drive and am a bit wary to buy it.

Is cache really that important in terms of performance? I know the momentus would be faster than any other 7200 RPM, but with the extra parts and relatively new design, I am afraid it would break more quickly than other drives.

It's a shame because my orginal 5400 RPM drive is still going strong after 3 1/2 years of being used almost constantly. Maybe I should buy that brand again.

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Cache really won't make that much of a difference. I have a WD Scorpio Black that I bought in June, and it is a noticeable improvement over the standard HDD. That's the drive I recommend to anyone looking to upgrade.

As mentioned earlier, get a Seagate Momentus XT, they are a hybrid ssd/regular HDD faster than any regular hdd but not quite ssd speeds.
They run about $120CDN for 500 gigs.

get the momentus xt . its super fast. not as fast as the ssd . but its really faster than a regular 7200 hd !

Just get an SSD.

I wanted fast disk I/O as well so I went with a pair of 7200rpm drives in RAID 0.

The General said:

Just get an SSD.

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+1 It is not the speed that is as important as the low latency for random reads. That is what makes a machine feel fast.

What are you using it for? That makes a big difference as to what will fit you best. What do you need all this speed for?

steiney said:

Red Tomato: Sorry for the delayed response. To answer your question, I want the speed just for general quickness of my system. I just want things to be snappier and load faster. I know the HDD is only one piece in the puzzle.

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for a snappy feel and fast loading what is important is the acces times of the drive.

ssd are awesome with 0.1 to 0.2ms access times where as traditional rotational drives will give you may say 10 to 15ms.

i know that higher rpm will result in better access times but even the velociraptor with 10k rpm will not be able to give you the snappy response and fast loading.

if ssd is out of your budget then get the seagate momentus xt as others have already recommended. it is a hybrid drive combining ssd and rotational disk technology.

i use to have it installed in my imac. now it's in my wintel rig. in windows 7 hdtune tells me that the momentus xt has about 2ms access time. velociraptor i think might give you 7 or 8ms i think.

I took a Raptor out of its heat sink at work one day and put it into 2.5 MBP 2008 and it didn't have enough power to boot. The drive wouldn't spin up.

steiney said:

Red Tomato: Sorry for the delayed response. To answer your question, I want the speed just for general quickness of my system. I just want things to be snappier and load faster. I know the HDD is only one piece in the puzzle.

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The slowest piece of the puzzle is the HDD. With a XT, it's still the slowest piece but about 100x.

I just ordered a OWC SSD myself.

For you the XT is good (although it's only 4GB SSD) or WD makes a killer 500GB 7200rpm. I think WD >>>>>>> seagate. Most agree.

The XT will help the most common apps load up quicker with the 4GB SSD. I'm not a fan of it personally as you said just being so different.

Get a WD 7200rpm or a SDD. I have a 2007 MBP myself. I'm also 1.5 not 3.0 for SATA so I won't get the full effEct of my OWC (285mb/s !!!!!). I'll get half that. Still better than the ~70mb/s from a HDD. But I'm going to be buying a new machine next year and I'm going to be bringing that SSD with me, so itll get a workout for sure.