MacBook Pro Battery Life with 7200 RPM HD

[billakay]

Hello,
I am a recent Mac convert, but longtime UNIX user. I currently have a circa '06 white MacBook with a 1.83 Core Duo, 2GB RAM, and 160 GB 5400 RPM HD (original 60 GB died and replaced/upgraded).

I am very anxious to get a new MacBook Pro, and am curious about other peoples experience with one thing: On the older MBP (15"), do you see a significant reduction in battery life with the 7200 RPM HDs, or is the power management efficient enough to negate it? I realize that they need a little more current but is it significant enough to eat into the base spec 4-5 hours?

This machine will be a replacement for my current portable, as well as my current desktop PC (almost 5 years old). I am a Computer Science graduate student and I want to squeeze as much life as I can out of this thing, so I plan on getting the 2.8/4GB/320GB 7200 RPM combo.

Thoughts are much appreciated.

Bill

 

[nope7308]

Hello,
I am a recent Mac convert, but longtime UNIX user. I currently have a circa '06 white MacBook with a 1.83 Core Duo, 2GB RAM, and 160 GB 5400 RPM HD (original 60 GB died and replaced/upgraded).

I am very anxious to get a new MacBook Pro, and am curious about other peoples experience with one thing: On the older MBP (15"), do you see a significant reduction in battery life with the 7200 RPM HDs, or is the power management efficient enough to negate it? I realize that they need a little more current but is it significant enough to eat into the base spec 4-5 hours?

This machine will be a replacement for my current portable, as well as my current desktop PC (almost 5 years old). I am a Computer Science graduate student and I want to squeeze as much life as I can out of this thing, so I plan on getting the 2.8/4GB/320GB 7200 RPM combo.

Thoughts are much appreciated.

Bill

Excellent question - I'm curious about battery life too (still waiting on specs). Why the 2.8 though? The performance improvements seem modest, but the price difference is substantial!

 

[velocityg4]

I recall reading a review several months ago on power drain of 5400 RPM laptop hard drive versus 7200RPM and the difference is negligible. In the worst case the difference was just a few minutes of battery life.

Here is a chart of Maximum power draws of many Laptop hard drives.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2-5-hard-drive-charts/Maximum-Power-Consumption,684.html

Here is one of Idle power draws (almost imperceptible differences)
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2-5-hard-drive-charts/Idle-Power-Consumption,681.html

At the greatest extreme for Maximum power draw between the lowest 5400 and highest 7200 is about 2.5 watts although the average looks to be around 0.5 watts (I did not do the math just looked at some samples from the charts). This is being drawn from a 50 watt battery. So either end can only mean a few minutes of power.

One tip buy the HD third party yourself for about the same price as the 7200RPM upgrade (low end MBP) then for a little bit extra get an external enclosure to toss the slower HD into for a backup drive.

Full list of other 2.5" charts
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2-5-hard-drive-charts/benchmarks,25.html