New silent, quick hard drive....

Hi Guys,
First off, this is my first post, it look like I can learn a huge amount from this forum and look forward to helping others too!
I want to upgrade my Macbook Pro to make it as quick and efficient as possible as soon it will be my primary computer, I was looking at the Momentus XT as a possible hard drive but heard it gets quite loud and vibrates under load. I would mostly be using my Macbook Pro for movies, and studying, but might delve into Keynote for presentations etc. I love how the Macbook Pro is so quiet so if possible would like to keep that quality with the new hard drive as well as keeping costs down. I would need at least 500GB, anyone have any experiences?

You stated "silent" and "costs down" and they don't usually go together:

Solid-state drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

500GB and 5400 RPM would be your best yet.

Here you go. Take your choice - prices starting at $1499.00.

chscag said:

Here you go. Take your choice - prices starting at $1499.00.

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Quit making me drool! That is why I stated silent and cheap don't mix. Now quiet and cheap on the other hand. That's a different story

be eatured

Hi Guys,
Fair enough, Would you say that a 5400RPM coupled with 4GB RAM should make my Macbook Pro reasonably fast in loading applications like pages, iPhoto etc?
mdfuller, I guess I used the wrong word, when I said silent I meant quiet in as much as I've heard complaints that the Momentus XT vibrates a bit and makes noise, for me where I won't be doing any HD video editing or really CPU intensive tasks, it doesn't seem like a good trade-off, gaining possible noise and vibration for an increase in speed where it's not necessarily needed..

If you want fast then you need to go with a 7200 RPM. Faster means more heat, and possibly vibration. >_<"

CrimsonRequiem said:

If you want fast then you need to go with a 7200 RPM. Faster means more heat, and possibly vibration. >_<"

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And anything over 7200 will be faster, but it definitely means more noise and/or heat in most cases.

Maybe it's just worth upgrading to a 500GB hard drive (5400RPM) and upgrading the RAM to 4GB, maybe this will give me enough of a boost on speed without compromising battery life and/or heat and vibration

Chris H. said:

And anything over 7200 will be faster, but it definitely means more noise and/or heat in most cases.

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Do they even have anything faster than 7200 for Notebooks? I've seen some 2.5" HDDs that are running at 10000 RPM but they require a huge heatsink.

Jack06 said:

Maybe it's just worth upgrading to a 500GB hard drive (5400RPM) and upgrading the RAM to 4GB, maybe this will give me enough of a boost on speed without compromising battery life and/or heat and vibration

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That's totally up to you. If you want your applications to load fast and save files quickly then you will need a 7200 RPM or SSD. RAM doesn't make your system run faster...just smoother.

Jack06 said:

Hi Guys,
Fair enough, Would you say that a 5400RPM coupled with 4GB RAM should make my Macbook Pro reasonably fast in loading applications like pages, iPhoto etc?

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Well if you care about application startup speed then you need a faster hard drive. I have a 7200 RPM drive and it's not really that loud, hot, or has much vibrations but everyone has their own levels of tolerance. Also not all drives are built the same so make sure you read up on the reviews.

A SSD is really what you want but it's a costly solution. It is both fast and silent. You are going to have to choose which is more important to you and how much you can afford. Increasing performance comes with it's drawbacks. For example buying a fast sports car means you get less fuel economy. You have to just choose which is more important to you.

Hi Endless,
thanks for the reply, I guess the closest I will come to SSD is the Momentus and it's 4GB...
Could you tell me something, I understand that your most used programs are put into the SSD, but if your most used programs changed, does the SSD update, or would I have to manually reset the SSD (if that's possible)?
Cheers

Jack06 said:

Hi Endless,
thanks for the reply, I guess the closest I will come to SSD is the Momentus and it's 4GB...
Could you tell me something, I understand that your most used programs are put into the SSD, but if your most used programs changed, does the SSD update, or would I have to manually reset the SSD (if that's possible)?
Cheers

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If you do end up purchasing a SSD it's basically the same as any storage device. You install the Operating system and all your programs/applications onto the SSD.

When you are working you save a copy to the SSD, and then copy that file over to an external storage device. IE. External HDD, USB pen/thumb drive.

Saving directly to a USB pen/thumb drive is just asking for corrupted data.

Almost a year since the last post on this issue of a 7200, and noisier, HD, but it's of great interest to me at this stage. I've just transplanted a new Seagate 500 Gb 7200 rpm drive into my Macbook, replacing the original Fujitsu 120 Gb 5400. There is now a distinct humming noise, that I thought initially was a boat out on the nearby bay!

Any 'cures' for this noise, or does one just learn to live with it? At least the 'plink' noise of the Fujitsu head being parked has been relocated to the external enclosure .

I just got a new Macbook Pro with a 128GB SSD and used an OWC disk doubler to replace the optical drive with a Seagate 500GB Momentus XT - which seems extremely quiet to me.

Stan, I'd be curious as to whether or not the Momentus is able to perform better than a standard 500GB Seagate HD in your case. If you're not running programs off it or doing the same operations consistently, what will it be able to "learn" in order to expedite those operations with its SSD cache.

I am afraid i can't answer your question. I am running the programs off of the ssd. My users directories are on the Momentus, so it is primarily data storage. Whether I will reap any real benefit from its hybrid capabilities I can't say. I will say that having used a computer that boots from an SSD, it would be awfully hard to go back to one without it. It is soooooo fast

i have the samsung spinpoint m8 1tb in my macbook pro and it is pretty quite and pretty fast i have no issues with it so far and i have put the harddrive its self under some pretty heavy write conditions with in one day it cycled from snow leopard to bootcamp then lion with boot camp and the next day to SL with boot camp and i dont think i have herd it once. the only time the computer ever felt slow and sluggish was when i had lion...


EDIT: in all of the OSX changes i did migrations from a "different mac" of apx about 200 GB took about a hour to transfer that data over sata/usb exter casing

Bob_Stan said:

I am afraid i can't answer your question. I am running the programs off of the ssd. My users directories are on the Momentus, so it is primarily data storage. Whether I will reap any real benefit from its hybrid capabilities I can't say. I will say that having used a computer that boots from an SSD, it would be awfully hard to go back to one without it. It is soooooo fast

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Using SSDs does spoil you. It really does. All my rigs have either OCZ Vertex 2 or 3s in them...outside of the Macbook Air. The speed is just...ridiculous.