Macbook Pro HD Upgrade

[AZ-GT]

I want to upgrade the HD in my 15" Macbook Pro. There is a Toshiba 200 gb
at 4200 RPM or a Seagate 160 gb at 5400 RPM. Should I go for speed or storage? (Price doesn't matter)

 

[WildCowboy]

Which is more important to you?

I think the 200 GB drive is pretty slow...

 

[TowerRat]

I want to upgrade the HD in my 15" Macbook Pro. There is a Toshiba 200 gb
at 4200 RPM or a Seagate 160 gb at 5400 RPM. Should I go for speed or storage? (Price doesn't matter)

I vote SPEED

 

[treblah]

I think the 200 GB drive is pretty slow...

Maybe not…

It's interesting to note that the new 200GB mechanism spins at only 4200RPM but with that much data compacted on those tiny 2.5-inch platters they can actually have a better transfer rate than 5400RPM drives since there is actually more data flying past the heads at any given moment.

 

[AZ-GT]

I'm leaning toward the 200gb because of the storage. I have 60gb in my Itunes library, want to make room for Parallels, and haven't even started collecting video clips. My MB Pro will be my only computer.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Maybe not…

However dense the data is on the platter, there is still the latency problem. Latency is the time it takes before a drive is ready to start reading or writing actual bits. For small data reads and writes, the latency takes more time than the actual read or write.

For any read or write, the platter has to rotate under the head to locate the start of the data block. This takes an average of half of the rotational period of the drive (under ideal conditions. Head transit time and logical processing time may make it take more than one rotation by the time the head is ready to read - but the relative measure is still applicable)

4200 RPM drive rotational latency average is .12 microseconds

5400 RPM drive rotational latency average is .09 microseconds

That's a 25% reduction in latency; this affects almost every operation that the drive does. The exception is streaming a large block of contiguous data, uninterrupted by other requests, in that case latency is minimized.