I am going off to uni in september and am going to get a mbp when the merom processors are released. Anyway, I can't decide whether to go for the 100gb or the 120 gb hard drive. This may sound stupid but how much extra space do you get because in my experience the larger the harddrive the less the actual formatted space is and also is the speed increase noticable. I would mainly be writting word docs and using itunes etc so i guess it is lots of small read and write tasks. Any input much appreciated.
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100GB 7200 vs 120GB 5400 MBP
- Thread starter joe8232
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From the sound of it, what you use your computer for doesn't render you needing the extra speed, go for the extra capacity.
I would suggest the 100gb/7200rpm. It will be a lot faster. If you were comparing a 60/7200 or a 80/7200 I would suggest the 5400 as it would have a poential to be just as fast. But the difference in space is only 20gb which makes the 7200 drive a lot faster and your 'only' loosing 20gb.
if you need alot of space and 100Gb isint enough space i reccomend you get an external hard drive. The speed increas between a 7200 and 5400 is very noticable. Go for the 7200.
You're running in to a transfer barrier, it's not the 5400 rpm drive that's making it feel slow in your case, it's the fact that it's an external drive linked via usb/firewire which = way slower than the drives throughput capability.fenixx said:
Anyhow, the speed difference is BARELY noticable between the 5400 / 7200. If you need that extra space, go for the 120 as you probably won't even be able to recognize the speed difference between the two.
Hector said:
The burst speed of that drive should be above 90mb/s with a sustained data rate of 60+mb/s.
try real world use, are you sure thats not Mbit?
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/mobile-hdds/index.x?pg=7
see how only the 7200rpm desktop drives get past 50MB/s
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/mobile-hdds/index.x?pg=7
see how only the 7200rpm desktop drives get past 50MB/s
http://barefeats.com/5472.html :
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...
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...
Basically it all depends on what you do with your notebook.
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...
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...
Basically it all depends on what you do with your notebook.
I just had the same discussion with an Apple Store employee yesterday. His advice was to go with the 120Gig drive for everyone *except* customers who import lots of large video files (due to dropped frames).
He said for most everyone else the speed difference wouldn't be noticeable in any significant way.
He said for most everyone else the speed difference wouldn't be noticeable in any significant way.
pianodude123 said:
I think that I read on tomshardware.com (or was it pcworld) that the difference in battery life is negligible.
I would go for the 100GB 7,200rpm HDD for the extra performance.
Maybe you should include the read times too? Maybe the 1 where it shows the 5400 RPM drive being faster than the 7200 RPM drive?
Like I said originally when I quoted barefeats (where all of these graphs come from) it all depends on what you want to do with your computer. If you are working with large audio or video files go for the 7200 RPM drive, if you aren't you will benefit with more space since you wont see any real performance increase with the faster drive.
Like I said originally when I quoted barefeats (where all of these graphs come from) it all depends on what you want to do with your computer. If you are working with large audio or video files go for the 7200 RPM drive, if you aren't you will benefit with more space since you wont see any real performance increase with the faster drive.
risc said:
True, out of the 4 tests, the 5400rpm HDD beat the 7200rpm HDD by 1 second in one of the tests. In all of the other tests, the 7200rpm HDD beat the 5400rpm HDD. Perhaps not by a huge margin, but enough for me to want to go with the faster disk.
Those aren't times in seconds they are megabytes per second timings, and the 1 you are dismissing is the 1 for random reads which is anything other than large files, and considering most people think "performance" is how fast the hard drive opens files for them it is the most important benchmark on that site. What it says is exactly what Barefeats are saying; that if you don't work with large files you wont notice a difference between the 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM drive.
If you actually read the OPs post he says " I would mainly be writting word docs and using itunes etc so i guess it is lots of small read and write tasks." and for his usage the 7200 RPM drive will offer nothing other than 20 GB of missing space.
If you actually read the OPs post he says " I would mainly be writting word docs and using itunes etc so i guess it is lots of small read and write tasks." and for his usage the 7200 RPM drive will offer nothing other than 20 GB of missing space.
risc said:
Oops, that was my mistake- please forgive my ignorance.
risc said:
Well, I guess that I would have to agree with you risc- for the OP's needs the extra 20GB of space would be better than the extra rpms. I guess for me having the exra rpms is worth it in a sort of psychological way (e.g., faster is better).