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Bhennies

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 20, 2004
435
0
NYC & Baltimore
Hello- I am wondering if I should get the BTO upgrade to the 5400 RPM drive? I will be using an external glyph 7200 RPM firewire drive for audio. How much of an improvement will I notice (is it worth $113)? Also, if I get a BTO from the school store, I do not get free Apple care with their spring promotion, so I'd only get the upgrade if it was going to make a huge difference. I've got a stock 12" PB on hold, but can easily cancel my order. THANKS!
 
I'd recommend getting the free Applecare.

serious sound and video editing is ideally done on an external 7200rpm hard drive anyway, and since you've got that covered you'll be fine at 4200. I did a lot of editing on my old iBook's stock drive last year (some DV and lots of OfflineRT) and it wasn't that painful. these days I have 680GB of external FW storage and life is much better.
 
drive speed differences

not much difference. I'd do external firewire 800 as well.

and you only get the speed advantage when writing/reading to the disk. which isn't as frequent as one might imagine.

unless you are doing heavy video/audio editing.. but then you might want to consider something faster than a notebook anyway.

my .02
 
the difference between 4200rpm and 7200rpm is huge, but if you can get a free applecare for the 4200rpm then i'd recommend you take it. you can later on have an authorized reseller exchange the drive, if you decide you need the speed.

the speed difference is huger than a memory lift from 256M to 1G. i did both upgrades to my older powerbook (667dvi) and the hd one [i used the hitachi 7k60 but now i believe there are others too] gave far bigger speed boost. don't believe when others try to belittle this, the difference is great, really.
 
Since the hard drive is already the slowest part of any computer system, you might as well upgrade to the fastest available. I personally would get the free Apple Care, and then buy one of the Hitachi 60GB 7200RPM drives, you will see a much more noticeable jump in system performance from the drive. Just make sure you have enough RAM in your system so it doesn't get bogged down, at least 512MB and if you do a lot of multitasking/memory intensive programs, at least 1GB.
 
dragula53 said:
not much difference. I'd do external firewire 800 as well.

and you only get the speed advantage when writing/reading to the disk. which isn't as frequent as one might imagine.

unless you are doing heavy video/audio editing.. but then you might want to consider something faster than a notebook anyway.

my .02
I don't think the 12" has firewire 800, does it? Also, this is going to be a second computer, I will have a g5 at home in the studio. It will be used for Pro Tools and then basic tasks, which only requires 12 m/persec, whereas firewire 400 can easily handle that. DV editing can use the 800, that's for sure, but I won't be doing that.

But thanks everyone for your replies! Does anyone know someone who has thrown the 7200 rpm drive in a 12" PB? Does it overheat?
 
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