mbp drive speeds...

tws


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I’ve decided to purchase the 17” macbook pro laptop… I’ll be using this for CS2 & 3 as well as video editing. I intend to put all my data on an external 500GB Mercury Elite Pro 7200RPM FireWire 800 drive. The 17” macbook pro can be fit with a Seagate 100gb 7200rpm drive – the apple store online subtracts $100 for this configuration.

“The 7200rpm internal drive is NOT significantly faster than the stock 5400rpm when doing small RANDOM reads and writes. That implies that it won't give you much advantage for booting and normal operations.”

“However If you work on audio or video where large blocks are captured or played back, the 7200rpm internal drive of the MacBook has a clear advantage over the stock 5400rpm internal drive.”

Comments and benchmarks here:

http://www.barefeats.com/5472.html

I understand that intial speeds with the 7200rpm seagate drive are fast, however things slow down rapidly as the drive fills. Test show that the stock 160gb 5400rpm drives ultimately surpasses the speed of the Seagate 7200rpm when it becomes full or nearly so.

My question regards the amount of space that Is used by the apple OS and all the programs I would probably require. If the space is fairly small and I don’t utilize the remainder of the drive than it should remain fast. I would be saving all my data files on the external hard drive.

Bear in mind that I am not tech savvy.

Should I go with the 100gb 7200rpm drive?

Thank you for your thoughts.

tws
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2.6GHz Core i7 15" MacBook Pro - 8GB DDR3 SDRAM - 750GB 7200 RPM HDD - GeForce 650M GT 1GB VRAM
If all you're going to have on the internal hard drive are applications and the OS, the 100GB hard drive is far more than enough as of now. I have a 100GB hard drive and no external, and even with over 30GB of media on my computer I have around 40GB free. That's 70GB of space not taken by the apps and stuff, and I do have Photoshop as well as a good number of media-centric apps (though not for video-editing outside iLife really).
 
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tws


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thanks Discerptor!

good info...

hopefully, i'll not have problems with the drive as some have had.

it's a LOT of money for a computer, laptop or not

cheers,

tws
 
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if your using final cut i belive (im not at home right now) it takes up about 10 gigs.

i have a question while were on the subject.

im planing on getting the same MBP and i also have a external FW800 drive. now my question is if all my video files are on the external will the internal drive speed really matter when im editing?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MBP 2.4/2GB/200HD/256 8600gt
id say 5400 are still the sweet spot.

7200s are catching up in capacity, which was obviously their downfall for quite some time. When they become equal in capacity, the choice will be simple... until then, my 120gb 5400 is wonderful, and doesnt warrant the cost of a new, and probably smaller 7200
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Mac Studio, M1 Max, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD
Bear in mind that the 7200 RPM disks use more power and hence will run down your battery faster. I understand that the effect is not huge (15 to 30 minutes of overall operating time per battery charge if you are using your disk a lot) but it is a factor to consider.
 

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