So are all MBP owners with the 8600m GT cards screwed?

[throAU]

I've been pleased with the momentus XT in my 2011 MBP.

Its not totally SSD speed, but it's not 750 GB SSD price, either - and WAY faster than a regular hard drive in day to day usage.

[daneoni]

Originally Posted by Funkmasta

Is there any way to check for the machine's total uptime? I'd be interested to see the number on that one

About This Mac>More Info>System Report (If using Lion/Mountain Lion)>Software

As exampled below

[Funkmasta]

I checked the total hours on the 500gb 7200rpm I put in about 3 years ago and it says 16,000 hours. I think it's safe to say the total life of the MBP is over 30,000 hours, and not babying it either, I'm talking HD video editing, loads of 24 bit music recording and editing, and some heavy gaming at times to boot.

I can only hope my next MBP will stay relevant this long, this is part of why I'm waiting for Haswell to max out the graphics muscle on my new machine.

[peapody]

Originally Posted by kdum8

Thanks for your thoughts, they are good points to remember. Would installing this hybrid drive speed things up?

http://storage.toshiba.eu/cms/en/hdd...?productid=525

I would put in the momentus xt. I have the 2.4ghz version of this mac and the first thing I did when I got this machine was put in the hybrid drive. Simply speeds up things, application launches etc.

I would get rid of this machine because of all the talk of the graphics card, but it has been my daily driver without issue. Guess I will see it down the road soon, but I got the machine for just $375. Well worth the risk.

[kdum8]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

I'm not familiar with Toshiba's hybrid drives, but I would keep away from that one and go with the Seagate Momentus XT instead. The specific reason is the rotational speed: the Toshiba is running at 5,400 RPM (the same as your stock hard drive) while the Momentus XT line runs at 7,200 RPM. That alone makes a big difference.

I'm using a 500 GB Momentus XT. I felt the speed difference even before the flash memory came into effect. The flash memory just makes repeated tasks even faster.

A faster drive will make your general computing tasks feel more responsive. Opening programs, navigating files through Finder... a big one for me was searching through Spotlight, which was unbearably slow on the stock 5400 RPM drive and is now worth something with my Momentus XT. A faster hard drive won't help with all tasks, though. Video encoding tends to be limited by the processor, for example; photo editing can be limited by the processor and RAM. A faster hard drive wouldn't help at all, unless your system has to start accessing the swap file - but even then, you'd benefit much more from having more RAM in a case like that.

Originally Posted by peapody

I would put in the momentus xt. I have the 2.4ghz version of this mac and the first thing I did when I got this machine was put in the hybrid drive. Simply speeds up things, application launches etc.

I would get rid of this machine because of all the talk of the graphics card, but it has been my daily driver without issue. Guess I will see it down the road soon, but I got the machine for just $375. Well worth the risk.

The Momentus XT looks really good I have to admit, but I was really hoping to up my storage capacity to 1 TB. Granted however a rotational speed of 7200 RPM in addition to the hybrid nature is very desirable if I want to help up the speed of the machine.

Does anyone know if there are any 1 TB hybrid drives out there with 7200 RPM rotational speed available? That would be the drive to get.

[chrfr]

Originally Posted by kdum8

Does anyone know if there are any 1 TB hybrid drives out there with 7200 RPM rotational speed available? That would be the drive to get.

Hitachi/HGST has a 1TB 7200 RPM model that's 9.5mm tall and will fit in a MacBook Pro. http://www.hgst.com/travelstar-7k1000
EDIT: I now see you're looking for hybrid drives, but this one is just a regular spinning disk. Still quite fast though.