Macbook HD Upgrade

Hi,

I was looking to purchase this for my macbook

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=644054

Any comments - or would you recommend anything else???

Regards

Rich

celtictricky said:

Hi,

I was looking to purchase this for my macbook

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=644054

Any comments - or would you recommend anything else???

Regards

Rich

Click to expand...

Western Digital is a good brand - and this is a very nice drive. With that said, I would take a close look at Seagate too as they have a 5 year warranty.

Do you need an extra 50GB, or could you deal with 200GB? Reason I ask is because you'd get much better performance (faster boot time, faster program startups, etc.) with a 7200rpm drive, but those are only available for notebooks in sizes up to 200GB.

If you really need the extra 50 gigs, the WD is a good drive.

Geeky1 said:

Do you need an extra 50GB, or could you deal with 200GB? Reason I ask is because you'd get much better performance (faster boot time, faster program startups, etc.) with a 7200rpm drive, but those are only available for notebooks in sizes up to 200GB.

If you really need the extra 50 gigs, the WD is a good drive.

Click to expand...

Agreed - if speed is of concern, the 7200rpm spindle speed is a good trade-off for the extra capacity.

i purchased it two weeks ago, and i love it. dont notice any slowdows or such, then again i've never had a 7200 rpm drive.

Geeky1 said:

Do you need an extra 50GB, or could you deal with 200GB? Reason I ask is because you'd get much better performance (faster boot time, faster program startups, etc.) with a 7200rpm drive, but those are only available for notebooks in sizes up to 200GB.

If you really need the extra 50 gigs, the WD is a good drive.

Click to expand...

Would the speed really be that much difference???? For example, currently its take iPhoto (With 5000 images in) about 17 seconds to full load with images being shown? What could I expect from the 7200rpm?

Of course - I could probably wait until after Christmas, and the 7200 250Gb could be available by then too?

Well... keep in mind that this number is going to be somewhat inaccurate because I don't know how much data it's shifting, how fragmented it is, where on the disc it is (the data on the outside edge of a hard disk platter is transferred somewhat faster than the data that's at the inner edge of the platter), etc. But, based on the calculation I just did (I divided the sustained transfer rate of a 5400rpm drive by the sustained transfer rate of a 7200rpm drive and then divided 17 seconds by that number), you'd be looking at a loading time of about 11 seconds. And that difference will grow larger as the number of pictures increases.

In other words, it's a pretty significant difference.

What about the sound? The 5400 drives are silent. With the 7200 speeds would there be a huge increase in sound? Never had a 7200 laptop drive before. I know on some desktop versions they can get noisy.

Every 7.2k laptop drive I've ever owned (And I've owned three... the 160GB Seagate in the MBP, a Hitachi 7K60 in a Dell XPS, and a Toshiba 50GB drive in a Sager NP5620) has been completely inaudible unless you physically put your ear on the machine over the drive.

They also have no effect on battery life to speak of, and (except for the Toshiba drive, which was the second one I owned-and the last one I will EVER own) they run effectively no warmer than the 5.4k drives.