5400 RPM vs. 7200 RPM Hard Drive

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Soon I will be pulling the trigger on a 17" MBP, and was wondering how much faster a 7200 RPM HD would be than the standard 5400 RPM HD? Unfortunately it is only available in 100gig vs the 160gig HD @ 5400 RPM. However, it is a $100 cheaper, and I will be using at least two back up external Hard Drives... for space and photo archiving.

The MBP will be used primarily for photo processing. Will the faster RPM HD be noticeable? I will be using PhotoShop CS3 once it becomes available along with Aperture.

Thanks In Advance,

Chris
 
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Go with the larger hard drive, speed really isn't all that important for photo work. I have a 4200RPM (200GB) drive in my MacBook and it's fine for Aperture and PhotoShop.

If you were doing video editing I would say get the 7200, the 4200 isn't fast enough for video play back.
 
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The only benefit you would get from the faster drive while photo editing is with the scratch disc. Of course, you can generally bypass this problem with more RAM.

The main "problem" with getting the faster drive is that it will eat away at your battery life. Also, the faster drives tends to heat up more than their slower brethren.
 
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Well, a word of warning Kash. I have 2.5 GB of RAM on my Mac and I tried creating a 1 GB RAMDisk and using that for the scratch disk on Photoshop CS2. Photoshop ran out of scratch disk and started giving me "disk full" errors in about 5 minutes of real work! I was amazed. I conclude that Photoshop must use a prodigious amount of scratch space. More RAM likely will not alleviate the need for a fast disk when photo editing.
 
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I think you'd be better off getting the smaller 7200 rpm option if you are going to be using external drives to keep your data on. The extra storage of the slower drive won't be an issue. Data transfer is faster, so in theory it should boot quicker and launch programmes faster etc.

One downside though is it might be a bit noisier and use more power and get hotter.

There is plenty of info out there that shows 7200 rpm is better - just google it :)
 
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Man - I type slow.......
 
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it is 04:30 here in England :eek:

;)
 
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I installed a seagate 100Gb 7200rpm in my MacBook. Quite frankly I think its faster but I am not sure how much faster.

Noise? the Seagate it is dead quiet maybe more silent then the stock 60 Gb that I put in an enclosure and use for an external now.

Heat? No warmer then the stock hard drive. It runs about 58c with safari, itunes and word running, this is set with the fan running at the default speed.

Battery Life? Never paid too much attention to it but I think I get over 3 hrs or close to it and that is with no energy saving features enabled.

All in all I am very happy with my Seagate. :)
 

bobtomay

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Thinking about changing out my internal drive to a Seagate 8MB cache, 7200 RPM.

Just wondering if anyone knows (without going to the trouble of researching, as I'm plenty capable of using google myself) what my real experience read/write difference is between this and just getting an external Firewire 400 or 800 drive for video recording and editing. Or will I always be disappointed in the speed difference between the laptop and my desktop for this type of work.

Never have used external storage, always had room for all the drives I needed in the PC's I built.
 

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