Hard Drive Speeds on MBP

[pjgulliver]

I'm going to be purchasing a 15" MBP to go to bschool in the fall, and am curious about drive speeds. Will I notice the performance boost on 7200RPM vs 5400RPM? Probably the most intensive thing I'll do regularly will be running large data sets through excel or some stat modeling software. What is the battery hit with the faster drive? I'm assuming faster drives consumer more juice.

Thanks!

 

[Imbalance]

It depends on how 'large' you are talking about. Mostly it'll be loaded into RAM then manipulated there, so the HDD isn't likely to make too much difference. But it all depends on what you do, how much, which programs etc. In the end, I'd say more RAM would be better than a 7200rpm hdd.

 

[tejota1911]

The hard drive is the slowest part in a computer, especially in a laptop. If you have the money get the 7200RPM drive. A new MBP already comes with 2GB of RAM. If you need more than that(Which you probably won't), you can always upgrade it later. I upgraded my hard drive from a 120GB 5400RPM Fujitsu to the new Seagate Momentus 160GB 7200RPM drive(which is an option on the new MBP), and it is noticeably faster(booting, opening programs, transferring files, etc.).

 

[Wolfpup]

Barefeats benchmarks were interesting. The old 100MB Seagate 7200RPM drive wasn't really all that much faster than the 160MB 5400RPM drive-probably because the slower drive has a higher density.

But the new 160GB 7200RPM drive looked lots faster. Looks like it can sustain roughly 10MB/s faster transfer rate, and is just faster across the board.

That said, it depends on what you're doing as to whether you'll notice it. Programs would load faster (probably 25% going by those benchmarks), but once they're in RAM the hard drive speed won't matter unless you're pulling in large clumps of data, or lots of small files.