Macbook questions concerning upgrading options

[dukebound85]

Well I finally gave in and got a black macbook with 512 ram and 80 gig hard drive. Let me tell you I had the hardest time clicking that "order now" button or whatever lol.

Sorry if this has been asked before but my searches do not turn up the most reliable hits. Anyways I was and have been debating on what to do with the hard drive. I know there is a 100gb 7200 rpm seagate momentus that I could swap out the stock one for. My question is then if I do get that 7200 rpm drive, can I put the 80 gig sata one in an enclosure?

Is there even that big of a performance boost jumping from 5400 to 7200 for the daily use of excel and internet and video files saved to the disk?

And for the same amount of money, I could get a bigger capacity hard drive and access it via firewire 400. Would this be a better alternative than laying down 180 on the momentus?

Also I know this has been asked and believe me, I have been studying these boards like none other but who would you reccomend for 3rd party ram from? Pretty much I would like the most reliable yet cheapest that I can get like everyone else would.

Thanks for the advice and can't wait to play with this thing come friday! Should be a nice upgrade from my 1ghz emac

 

[skubish]

Well I finally gave in and got a black macbook with 512 ram and 80 gig hard drive. Let me tell you I had the hardest time clicking that "order now" button or whatever lol.

Sorry if this has been asked before but my searches do not turn up the most reliable hits. Anyways I was and have been debating on what to do with the hard drive. I know there is a 100gb 7200 rpm seagate momentus that I could swap out the stock one for. My question is then if I do get that 7200 rpm drive, can I put the 80 gig sata one in an enclosure?

Is there even that big of a performance boost jumping from 5400 to 7200 for the daily use of excel and internet and video files saved to the disk?

And for the same amount of money, I could get a bigger capacity hard drive and access it via firewire 400. Would this be a better alternative than laying down 180 on the momentus?

Also I know this has been asked and believe me, I have been studying these boards like none other but who would you reccomend for 3rd party ram from? Pretty much I would like the most reliable yet cheapest that I can get like everyone else would.

Thanks for the advice and can't wait to play with this thing come friday! Should be a nice upgrade from my 1ghz emac

I think you will get better performance with at least 1gb of RAM than worrying about a faster hard drive. OSX performs much better with at least 1GB and Excel, browsing internet, downloading/watching videos won't benefit much from a faster drive.

 

[dukebound85]

I think you will get better performance with at least 1gb of RAM than worrying about a faster hard drive. OSX performs much better with at least 1GB and Excel, browsing internet, downloading/watching videos won't benefit much from a faster drive.

What is "much" though. I know on my friend's vaio, replaying videos saved to the hard drive doesnt work that well with the standard hd.. seems a bit choppy. Would i have this situation as well?

 

[Sun Baked]

What is "much" though. I know on my friend's vaio, replaying videos saved to the hard drive doesnt work that well with the standard hd.. seems a bit choppy. Would i have this situation as well?

Enough memory to avoid the VM Manager will prevent a slowdown from 5300MB/sec to 50MB/sec -- big drop memory vs. using HD as memory.

A faster HD may net you a 1-5MB/sec increase between 5400 and 7200RPM drives (aka read the actual specs on the drives.)

However, getting a drive with a larger cache will help more than RPMs -- again read the specs, and don't go by RPMs.