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Any reason *not* to get a 7200rpm MBP drive?
- Thread starter oxfordguy
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There appears to be some reports of FanControl contributing to lockups and/or unexpected reboots...have a quick look around these forums and you will find them.
. . . would have mentioned any such hassles if present: you can assume fancontrol works fine in at least one competently setup Penryn 17".
. . need for random seek speed [roughly] = focus on OS responsiveness [little files being continuously loaded/saved] as opposed to focus on streaming speed of large contiguous data files.
In the server/serious workstation world where stability & performance really count, it is conventional to use 15K rpm boot volumes [ideally mirrored], then have some economical form of redundant storage off a serious hardware RAID controller.
So, basically what you are saying is that the OS will run smoother with a faster hard drive. Right?
. . OS will run *faster* . . . not really the same as smoother.
Put it like this, the moment one of these is a) 128GB & b) slightly more affordable than this OCZ-branded Samsung 64GB jobbie, I'll take some brave-pills & start unscrewing my MBP's case . . .
Yes, it's true but.......
....the HARD DISK HITACHI TRAVELSTAR 7200 200gb (RPM TECH) is an high density drive!
Hi
Simple
The 7200 rpm drive is good if you need to access your information quickly, its bad if you want your battery to last a long time.
With newer Macbook Pro models that use LED back lighting though the battery gain you make back from upgrading from fluorescent lighting is enough to justify the speed increase.
Another issue is heat, and also drive life, a buddy of mine has a 7200 rpm and has already had to have it replaced, fitted it himself.
The 7200 rpm drive is good if you need to access your information quickly, its bad if you want your battery to last a long time.
With newer Macbook Pro models that use LED back lighting though the battery gain you make back from upgrading from fluorescent lighting is enough to justify the speed increase.
Another issue is heat, and also drive life, a buddy of mine has a 7200 rpm and has already had to have it replaced, fitted it himself.
I ended up installing a new Hitachi 7K200 in my MBP and the difference from the stock Toshiba 120gb 5400rpm drive was amazing. The 7K200 is rated as the fastest laptop drive available. I think it's the best of both worlds, very fast speed (7200rpm + Perpendicular Technology) and a great capacity.
It's also a very low power requirement drive, my battery life has not been affected at all by the upgrade.
It's also a very low power requirement drive, my battery life has not been affected at all by the upgrade.
Thanks for sharing your experience rather than just an opinion.
I know that my next laptop will definitely have a 7,200 RPM drive, especially since I use Final Cut Studio.
On a Macintosh that has a serious lack of RAM, a faster hard drive may change it from absolutely terrible slow to seriously annoying slow
If the hard drive speed affects the speed of the OS, you should get more RAM. With lots of RAM, the operating system will also cache lots of data from the hard drive, so if you access many small files (where the 7200 RPM drive may be a bit faster), they will stay in RAM after the first access and will not be read again.
For large files, a large 5400 drive is about as fast as a 7200 drive while the drive is empty. As the drive fills, both will get slower, but the larger drive slows down less.
Nobody says a 200 GB 7200 RPM drive isn't faster than a 120GB 5400 RPM drive. The point is that _bigger_ drives are faster, and the 7200 RPM drive will be outperformed by a 320GB 5400 RPM drive.
Look at Barefeats.com for benchmarks if you're interested. Back when this was a hot topic, a (rather old) test revealed (comparing at 100 GB 7200 to others)...
a) The 7200rpm drives are the fastest when empty...
b)... but if you have 74GB of data on each of the drives, the 4200rpm drive was actually faster. That's because 74GB of data puts the 7200rpm drive at 80% capacity while the 200GB 4200rpm drive is only at 40% capacity. (See "74G Mark" graphs above.)
http://barefeats.com/mbcd7.html
Edit: fixed link
Thank you for being so quick with the link.
This was a very interesting read - something that I never realized before.
I hate to trouble you, but are you able to show another valid source that is more recent (this article is from 2006)? Though I know of Bare Feats, I feel more trusting when I read from more than just one source (especially a current article since technology rapidly changes).
Then I will feel complete assurance in getting a higher capacity 5,400 RPM instead of the 7,200 RPM.
Also, I have always thought that it is not recommended to get anything less than 7,200 RPM if you do video or audio work. Does that just apply to only the scratch disk (external drive) and not the system drive (internal)?
16 bit stereo audio at 44,100 samples/second is about 176KB per second or 0.176 MB per second or maybe one third of a percent of what a 250 GB 5400 RPM drive can write. Video coming from MiniDV is 3,600,000 bytes per second, that is a whopping six percent of what that drive can handle.
I think this advice needs to be read in context. The real advice used to be "get the fastest drive you can". That is less important now since drives have become faster anyway, so the second fastest drive might be just fine. But then some clever guy spotted that all else being equal (identical 120 GB drives, for example) the 7200 RPM is faster than the 5400, so they gave the advice "go for 7200 RPM. However, today this advice is incorrect because all else is not equal - the 7200 drives you can buy are smaller and therefore slower than the bigger 5400 RPM drives.
So, on a Mac Pro, there is an option for a 300 GB 15,000 RPM HDD.
The cost is really high considering that you are only getting 300GB of storage.
Are you saying that the 1TB 7,200 RPM would be much faster than the 300GB 15,000 RPM if both had 150GB of data on the drives?
The only benefit of the faster drive would be to put the 300GB 15,000 RPM drive in a RAID array, which the RAID Card is the necessary if you add that option on the configurator.
Will you please elaborate on the 15,000 RPM option versus 7,200 RPM option, as well as the advantages of the RAID Card?
Thanks in advance.
The cost is really high considering that you are only getting 300GB of storage.
Are you saying that the 1TB 7,200 RPM would be much faster than the 300GB 15,000 RPM if both had 150GB of data on the drives?
The only benefit of the faster drive would be to put the 300GB 15,000 RPM drive in a RAID array, which the RAID Card is the necessary if you add that option on the configurator.
Will you please elaborate on the 15,000 RPM option versus 7,200 RPM option, as well as the advantages of the RAID Card?
Thanks in advance.
Oooo, now I can understand why servers have 10.000/15.000 RPM disks.
Servers are slower than PC
The current 320gb 5400rpm drives do NOT outperform the 200gb 7200rpm drives but performance is fairly close due to the fact it has larger platters. With desktop drives the newer Western Digital 640gb drives come close to 10k raptor speeds due to having two single 320gb platters when most hard drives of that size have 3-4 smaller platters. A fast 500gb 5400rpm drive may end up outperforming the 7200rpm drives though if it doesn't have small platters.