7200 100gb or 5400 and 160gb?

Well the title sums it up do i buy a 5400rpm 160gb hardrive or a 7200 100gb harddrive? speed or space i am running windows xp at the moment i have a 60gb apple 5400 stock. 15gb to windows 45gb to mac.

Which One? :black:

I guess the most important question to be asked here is what are you planning on doing with your computer?

It all depends on how you feel about waiting. if you dont mind waiting an extra few seconds I would go with the space.. if you are in a major rush for things to get done quickly I would go with the speed.

ahhh but how fast is a few seconds? anybody got any hard results?

if you dont know the difference that you would experience go for space.

any other ideas?

For most things, the difference between 5200rpm and 7200rpm is negligiable... there are plenty of benchmarks (use Google) but they don't really give any indication of real life performance. Things like boot up time and app launching is sometimes noticeably different, but not nearly as much as the marketing men will try and tell you.

If you're using you Mac as a 32 track recording studio, which would require somthing like 3.2 gigs of bandwidth per minute, you'll want a fast drive - but then again if you did this, you'd probably be using a 500GB external drive anyway.

My advice is get the 100GB internal 7200 and if you're doing anything that needs more bandwidth and/or space, get an external drive. I quite honestly think that storing more than 100GBs of data on a laptop is risky anyway, it's unlikely you'll ever need that much data on the move, unless you're a HD video editor.

I was faced with a similar choice and I went with the space-- that's far more important to me than a few milliseconds.

I use Photoshop Elements, GarageBand, iPhoto, and all the usual suspects under OSX, and Adobe Audition and other Windows apps under XP/Parallels, and I am never faced with bad performance or any kind of wait.

I'd recommend going with whichever is more important to you.

I had the same problem. But seeing that the Macbook comes with a 5400rpm drive, and if your happy with its speed then you will have no problem with the 160 5400.

ryan000 said:

Well the title sums it up do i buy a 5400rpm 160gb hardrive or a 7200 100gb harddrive? speed or space i am running windows xp at the moment i have a 60gb apple 5400 stock. 15gb to windows 45gb to mac.

Which One? :black:

Click to expand...

I just installed a Seagate Momentus 100gb 7200 the drive works great, is quicker then the stock 60gb drive that came with my MacBook and is plenty big enough for my needs.

so do you notice a hugh diffrence? thanks

Huge? probably not, but there has been an increase speed.