7200 vs. 5400 rpm

can anyone tell me what the pros and cons are of these two different HD s? i heared that 7200 are louder.is that the only difference.would a 7200 be to loud/run to hot for the macbook ?

Louder and hotter, yes, but only marginally. It is otherwise an excellent upgrade in terms of speed.

agreed 7200 hard drive is a good upgrade. Looking at your specs you may also want to consider upgrading your RAM. It made a good difference for me in my Macbook.

Remember, louder and hotter also means decreased battery life. If it's plugged in most of the time, this isn't much of an issue, but if you lug that thing around often, then you'll see a hit in battery life.

a 320 gb 5400 hdd is as fast as a 200gb 7200rpm drive...

Its not just the rotational speed but also the capacity / density of the drive.

Plus the 320 5400 is at the same price as a 200 7200

Yea battery life is an issue ,will get a 320gig . pimp my mac. so what about SATA 2. Would this generation also be compatible with a MB.
what about HDD brands. Toshiba o.k.?

goobimama said:

Louder and hotter, yes, but only marginally. It is otherwise an excellent upgrade in terms of speed.

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this is all true, but i cant stress MARGINALLY enough.

maybe 3-5%max. i love my 7200

^so also 3-5% decrease in battery life as well?

Can one manually install a 7200RPM hard drive on a MB pro?

Oistrakh said:

^so also 3-5% decrease in battery life as well?

Can one manually install a 7200RPM hard drive on a MB pro?

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ive done tons of tests, and can not tell ANY difference in battery usage.

we are talking mA here, not much difference, if any on the two drives i have.

kgeier82 said:

ive done tons of tests, and can not tell ANY difference in battery usage.

we are talking mA here, not much difference, if any on the two drives i have.

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Really? I figured it would be a much bigger impact.

Hmm, now this has me thinking. If it doesn't have much of an impact, it shouldn't affect me much while I'm lugging the thing around between classes. I need to upgrade my hard drive anyway, I might as well add some speed on top of the extra space.

ome 7200 rpm drives use even less power than 5400 drives and emit less heat. It depends what technology the drive is using and what the one you have currently...

heres a few shots of each of the two HDs i own. The stock Apple Fujitsu 120gb PR drive, and my replacement 7k200

not much of a difference, definantly not what people claim as far as RPMs sucking up more power.

smaller screeny is of the 120.

what do these prove? during read/write (most of my day, along with most others), the HDs are near identical in power consumption. @ idle, the 5400 wins by .4W, other than that, none of the other numbers really matter to me. Sure the 7k200 eats 2x the power ON STANDBY, but who cares, standby last forever, and forever with either drive.

Consensus: buy the biggest drive you need, the fastest you want it. Id go with size over speed today though. WHen i bought the 200gb 7200, the highest 5400 was only 250, so it was worth it. Now its 120 GB more than the 7k200 (still the highest 7200 i know of).

the choice is of course yours. But when you have an itunes library that eats 40% of your 200GB drive by itself, youll wish you had the larger.

If anyone is interested, i have a 7k200 id like to help someone out with for a decent price.

PM me if so.

im trying to go with something a little bigger.

is the internal hard drive easily upgradable, like the RAM?

yep. 5min job, if your slacking

My next computer... I'm gonna put in a 15000 rpm server drive. HDDs are the bottleneck to speed. So I'd love to experiment with a drive 2x as fast as a normal desktop.

just because its RPMs are twice as fast, doesnt mean its 2x as fast.

giulio said:

My next computer... I'm gonna put in a 15000 rpm server drive. HDDs are the bottleneck to speed. So I'd love to experiment with a drive 2x as fast as a normal desktop.

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dood...jst get a SSD then........then it wont be the bottle neck for sure...

giulio said:

My next computer... I'm gonna put in a 15000 rpm server drive. HDDs are the bottleneck to speed. So I'd love to experiment with a drive 2x as fast as a normal desktop.

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Wouldn't you need a SCSI card in order to use a server grade 15k RPM drive?

I have two 10k RPM Raptors in a RAID 0 array in my desktop and that's pretty good. Could you imagine 10k RPM drives in a notebook?