Hello...Will having a 7200 rpm drive make my macbook pro run any faster? I already have 8gb of ram so doesnt every thing just save to the ram?
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7200 rpm make my computer faster?
- Thread starter ICutWithMacs
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Thanks for the fast reply...but I mean with an OPEN application will there be a performance boost?
It depends on the drive that you put in. All things being equal, except the rotational speed, it will be faster. If the drive that replaces it has a lower platter density, more platters, lower cache, etc, then you may not notice any difference and may notice a battery hit (not much nut a slight decrease). Too many variables to say for sure that rotational speed will make that noticeable of a difference.
You really have to look at the specs for the drive. Some 5400 RPM drives are faster than some 7200 RPM drives. it's fairly complex, and dependent on your hard disk usage. One might be better for sustained reads, sustained writes, or seeks.
A 7200 RPM drive will generally be faster than a 5400RPM drive of similar vintage. It will also generally run hotter, which is a consideration for notebooks.
No, it's certainly not true that "everything is loaded in RAM". With sufficient RAM, you will eliminate most swapping activity. But programs still have to be loaded, and so the hard disk speed will effect load time. As well, many applications read/write data to the hard drive and of course that will be effected as well.
For example, if you are editing video files, then your editor will be reading and writing huge volumes of data that will NOT all fit in RAM at once. As well, it still has to get into RAM to be processed and back out again... This will be sensitive to sustained read/write.
If you use some kind of database application, then it will be sensitive to seek times.
A 7200 RPM drive will generally be faster than a 5400RPM drive of similar vintage. It will also generally run hotter, which is a consideration for notebooks.
No, it's certainly not true that "everything is loaded in RAM". With sufficient RAM, you will eliminate most swapping activity. But programs still have to be loaded, and so the hard disk speed will effect load time. As well, many applications read/write data to the hard drive and of course that will be effected as well.
For example, if you are editing video files, then your editor will be reading and writing huge volumes of data that will NOT all fit in RAM at once. As well, it still has to get into RAM to be processed and back out again... This will be sensitive to sustained read/write.
If you use some kind of database application, then it will be sensitive to seek times.
I personally like the 7200RPM Western Digital Scorpio Black as the 'performance' HDD; with that said, unless you are running the old Fujitsu 250GB drive or ones that run at similar speeds, you may not notice a huge difference. The old Fujitsu in the 2009 (maybe earliest '10) 13 inch MBPs is quite possibly the slowest modern drive, with it running slower than most 5200 and even 4xxx RPM drives. If you are running the more modern 5400 RPM drives, as people have said, you may get no performance increase at all. Furthermore, you may find it to be too noisy. Going from HDD to performance HDD is like adding a cold air intake. If you get a SSD, it is like dumping a scubatank of NOS directly into the engine with Vin Diesel behind the wheel.
+1 for 7200 RPM WD Scorpio Black. I put one of those in an old Macbook (first one with Intel cpu) and it made it much more enjoyable to use. That and Chrome.
This is worth noting for anyone looking for improved performance. The performance gains one sees with Chrome are spectacular with such fewer system resources being tied up, as well as faster load times by design.
I am an old school FireFox guy and as I type this, I am using over 1GB of RAM on FF4...and I don't have that many add-ons!