Hard Drive Speeds - Need advice

[MaddieBrad]

Hello,
I am about to purchase a new Macbook Pro. I am getting the 17" with the high res screen. I am using the MBP as a professional digital photographer, and for all my basic Mac head type of things. I do a lot of video work, and am basically a gear head. But what I need advice on is the hard drive that I am going to get. I know that the 7200 rpm 160 GB drive is the best performance. But I am afraid that I will run out of space like I have on my 100GB Powerbook. The extra space seems to outweigh the benefits of having the faster drive to me. How much faster are we talking about here between the 250 GB 4200 rpm drive and the 160 GB 7200 rpm drive. Give me some real world examples and performance examples. Like when i drop 300 RAW images from my camera onto my MBP, what is the difference in time it takes. Will I really notice the diff in my day to day usage??

I would be most interested to hear from other people in my profession what they would choose.

Regards,

Brad

 

[California]

I heard that the larger slower drives somehow are faster than the smaller capacity drives with the same slow speed... has something to do with the disc's size. I don't have those kind of space problems but I like speed over storage personally.

 

[matperk]

I just upgraded from a 100gb 7200rpm drive to a 250gb 5400rpm drive. I really don't notice that much of a speed difference when I'm running the OS. When I'm booting, it does take a little bit longer.

However, I much needed space over speed. When I capture video, I capture to external drives anyway, so it's not an issue.

If you're really questioning it and not sure...go the middle route...get a 160gb 7200rpm.

 

[Wolfpup]

I don't know about that 250GB drive specifically, but as an example, Seagate's 160GB 5400RPM drive isn't all that much slower than their 100GB 7200RPM drive. It is slower, but only by a few MB/s.

The 160GB 7200RPM drive on the other hand is a good 10MB/s faster than the 5400RPM model, and just creams it in every benchmark by a wide margin.

A 250GB model would probably do a bit better (although maybe not-the number of platters makes a difference too, and I don't know what any of these are using). The 7200RPM drive would definitely be faster though. Faster seeking for small files. Faster transfer rates for large ones.

Is an external drive a possibility in combination with the internal?

 

[smiddlehurst]

To be honest I'd say leave it at the default drive (5,400rpm on-line, 7,200 in-store) and spend the extra cash on an external hard drive. As a comparison you can pick up a 160Gb external bus powered drive in a nice aluminum case to match the MBP) for around £60 while the upgrade to a 250Gb internal drive would be £100...

 

[MaddieBrad]

To be honest I'd say leave it at the default drive (5,400rpm on-line, 7,200 in-store) and spend the extra cash on an external hard drive. As a comparison you can pick up a 160Gb external bus powered drive in a nice aluminum case to match the MBP) for around £60 while the upgrade to a 250Gb internal drive would be £100...

Yeah... I already use the Lacie Porsche USB Bus powered drives. I got one 80gig and was gonna get another 80. Thats why I am thinking i will just get the bigger drive. I would just like to use my internal drive for iphoto and itunes. At the moment i have all my itunes on my external and its a pain in the ass when i want to play my itunes library at home... I need to dig out the drive and plug it in. I dunno... I think that the bigger drive will be fine. Where is the 7200 rpm 200 gig????? lol

 

[Igantius]

For the majority of tasks, when the drive is is making short bursts of reading/writing, the 7200 is faster, but not massively. In sustained reading and writing, it's generally a lot faster - but in this situation, you'll be doing stuff like audio or video editing (as you say you are), which you should ideally be using an external disk as scratch disk.

There are quite a lot of threads about this topic already and a few also contain links to various speed tests/benchmarks, which you would find useful as you've got to keep a few things in mind when deciding which type of disk to go for.

 

[Wolfpup]

Seagate's 160GB 7200 RPM drive looked a lot faster in benchmarks across the board (as compared to their 160GB 5400RPM drive).