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Buying new HD: Speed or Size, hat matters more?

S

spellflower

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 7, 2005
236
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I'm shopping for a new hard drive for my mid 2007 MacBook.

In checking out Newegg, it seems that $70 wil buy either a 640GB, 5400rpm WD Blue drive or a 500GB, 7200rpm WD Black drive.

Which will serve me better? 1800rpms or 140GB?
 
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The computer currently has a 120GB drive and I'm not sure how fast it is, but I'd sure like it to be faster.

I currently keep all my media in a 500GB external drive, and I'd sure like to move that onto my laptop and still have room to spare.

I've basically narrowed it down to these two drives, but I'm not sure which wish to prioritize.

Right now I'm thinking speed, as that's been a frustration, and it affects everything I do, whereas only media files are affected by lack of space.
 
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But is it worth $50 more? My MacBook is 3 years old- I'm not sure it makes sense to put $120 into it at this stage...
 
Faster drive (usually) equals more power, so be prepared to take a battery hit with the faster drive. Old Dell that I subbed out took a 45-minute hit on discharge time. (Out of 3 hours)
 
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Talked to a friend who said the faster drives run hot in laptops and don't necessarily make a huge difference in speed on web and Word.

I think I'll get the big Blue drive and buy RAM if it's still slow.
 
spellflower said:
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Talked to a friend who said the faster drives run hot in laptops and don't necessarily make a huge difference in speed on web and Word.

I think I'll get the big Blue drive and buy RAM if it's still slow.
Click to expand...

They don't run hot, but your right about the fact that they don't provide a big speed boost. You may notice a 7200 RPM drive boots like 5 sec faster than a 5400 RPM drive and downloads files a bit faster, but its really not a noticeable speed boost.
 
blevins321 said:
Faster drive (usually) equals more power, so be prepared to take a battery hit with the faster drive.
Click to expand...
This isn't necessarily true. Some 7200 rpm drives consume less power than some 5400 rpm drives. You really have to look at individual specs.
 
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I just spent an hour reading reviews on Newegg.

All the Western Digital Scorpio Blue drives get great reviews overall, but many people report problems with the power saving feature, which causes the drive to spin down after 5 seconds of inactivity, even when watching movies.

Enough people seem to have this problem that I'm thinking I'll go with the faster Black line to avoid it. Not one of the reviews for the Black drives mentions this problem.
 
Id like to know about this too, but im not too fussed on speed. More reliablity.

i have been looking at the G-tech series, the G-DRIVE mini or G-RAID mini
but have heard that the Hitachi drives are too great?

Also been looking at the WD My Book series.

Ideally i would like a 2tb firewire drive for external storage with a possible RAID, a 1TB (or required amount) for a scratch disk and another 1tb drive for time machine.
 
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