Momentus XT vs Scorpio HDD

A

Alpha.K

macrumors member
I'm looking to upgrade my new 15" with one of these two, my current 320GB is almost full so I'm interested in the Momentus XT 500GB or the Scorpio Blue 1TB 5400rpm or the Scorpio Black 750GB 7200rpm.

I'll be using it for Music(about 40GB worth), Movies(200GB right now) and Games(such as WoW and CS:S).

Any suggestions and help would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
Alpha.K said:
I'm looking to upgrade my new 15" with one of these two, my current 320GB is almost full so I'm interested in the Momentus XT 500GB or the Scorpio Blue 1TB 5400rpm or the Scorpio Black 750GB 7200rpm.

I'll be using it for Music(about 40GB worth), Movies(200GB right now) and Games(such as WoW and CS:S).

Any suggestions and help would be appreciated. Thanks.
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The faster the drive speed (rpm) the more battery it will use. You can lose up to 2 hours or so of life.

That being said, I dislike the momentus, if you want a SSD, buy one. None of this hybrid crap. Also, note that you won't see much speed diff. between the momentus and the 1TB WD (if any at all) as the 1TB (even if it's a 5400rpm) will be just as fast basically due to it's size. The fastest drive will be the 750GB 7200rpm most likely.

Again though, real world experience, you probably won't notice a huge diff between any of those 3 you listed.

I personally have the WD blue 640GB in my optibay slot and love it. It's fast for a 5400RPM drive due to it's increased size. If I was use, and your putting it in the main bay, I'd deg get one of those two WD's, probably the 1TB if you want tons of storage. The lower rpms will save on some battery but you will still see a speed increase due to the density of the platter.
 
I will have to disagree with you. I have a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB in my 15" MBP and its faster by far than any of previous drives i have tried it with.

Please dont knock a product just because you dont like the sound of it.


millerb7 said:
The faster the drive speed (rpm) the more battery it will use. You can lose up to 2 hours or so of life.

That being said, I dislike the momentus, if you want a SSD, buy one. None of this hybrid crap. Also, note that you won't see much speed diff. between the momentus and the 1TB WD (if any at all) as the 1TB (even if it's a 5400rpm) will be just as fast basically due to it's size. The fastest drive will be the 750GB 7200rpm most likely.

Again though, real world experience, you probably won't notice a huge diff between any of those 3 you listed.

I personally have the WD blue 640GB in my optibay slot and love it. It's fast for a 5400RPM drive due to it's increased size. If I was use, and your putting it in the main bay, I'd deg get one of those two WD's, probably the 1TB if you want tons of storage. The lower rpms will save on some battery but you will still see a speed increase due to the density of the platter.
Click to expand...
 
So would 500GB be enough for me or do you guys think I should buy a larger capacity drive would better suit my needs keeping in mind that I download all my tv shows so they build into the large library that I have now.
 
Alpha.K said:
So would 500GB be enough for me or do you guys think I should buy a larger capacity drive would better suit my needs keeping in mind that I download all my tv shows so they build into the large library that I have now.
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I'd go bigger so you don't have to upgrade again soon. I imagine 750 would be big enough if you wanted a 7200 RPM drive.
 
you also can get a 2tb NAS just to store you tv shows and stick to a 500gb on the MBP, which is already pretty big and can hold lots of stuff.
 
I've got a Seagate Momentus XT which I've had for almost two months now. Initially, I was amazed at this drive. Boot times down to 26 secs from the time you hear the bell to the logon prompt. Aperture, iTunes, etc. booting up much quicker.

However, as I've used my laptop more frequently the last few days, I've noticed that the spinning ball come down more frequently and it would last a few seconds. This happens when switching between tabs in Safari, right clicking an item, opening up a window... At first I thought it was also because I was running Transmission concurrently but I quit Transmission but I continue to have intermittent spinning beach balls showing up but not as frequent. Not quite sure what to make of it but I've been quite annoyed by it the last two nights. I'll just put up with it. I'm planning on getting rid of my MBP anyway when the new MBPs come out.
 
alust2013 said:
I'd go bigger so you don't have to upgrade again soon. I imagine 750 would be big enough if you wanted a 7200 RPM drive.
Click to expand...

One advantage of a 750 is you could create two partitions - one of say 150megs as the boot patron and the second as a data partition. While that won't give you the speed of a hybrid or SSD; it will be a bit faster because the 1st partition will use the outer edge of the drive and have less physical space to cover as it fills - meaning faster data access times than for a single 750MB partition.

It's not a bad cost/speed tradeoff.

Of course, one problem with video and music collections is they constantly increase and require more space. One way to help is to periodically thin the herd by offloading to a backup drive the 100mb that are the oldest, in terms of last access date.

O-H
 
Both seem to be really good and are probably amoung the best of HDDs. I've had only good experiences with the Cavier Black as well.
 
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