Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Making SR Macbook Pro just a little bit better

B

buywisdom

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 17, 2005
43
1
I bought a 2.2Ghz 128mb vram MBP about a month ago. I got the 120gb drive at 5K and now I am thinking about how nice it would be to have all my stuff (160 gb music + 30gb pics) on my laptop without having an external drive. I know that both toshiba and WD make 250gb drives that run at 5K and I believe that toshiba makes a 200gb at 7K but I have not seen a 7k bigger than 200gb (are there any in the works?). In any case am not terribly concerned about speed since a drive twice the size of my current one will be at least 50% faster at the same RPM (I think). Also I have read a bit about hybrid drives, are they all hype or is there some truth to their speed boost? I have looked and cannot seem to find any for sale. I am wondering if OS X will even be able to use the flash memory in them. Has anyone tried this assuming that they are out? I guess my question is would you recommend waiting for 10.5 to see if hybrid is supported or just go for a 250gb at 5K.

On a side note I guess if I do get the 250gb at 5k and 10.5 does do something like Vista's readyboost then I could get some flash disk for the pc express slot assuming it would be able to access it fast enough.

Also I have a question about ram. I saw a thread about this but the answer was not clear. Will the SR MBP support 4gb ram modules when they come out? If so does that mean one could have 8gb of ram in a MBP or is there some other limiting factor. By the way this MBP is amazingly fast compared to the 1.67 ghz g4 I had at the beginning of the summer.

Thanks
 
160gb of music?? wow, thats ALOT of music!!

ok, so first off a 250gb @ 5400rpm will not be any faster than 120gb @ 5400rpm
it will simply just have more space.

as for SSD, you can get a 16gb card to go in your express slot, but its around $200

and what you are talking about with turbo memory (robson) is completly differnt than hybrid harddrives, turbo memory relates to ram, not storage

now here is my question, do you really need all 160gb of music on your laptop?
why not put your fav music on it 20-30gb or so. and keep the rest on an external...

can you even listen to 160gb of music in a lifetime?? lol

acording to intel SR can use all 8gb of ram (when it becomes avaliable)
 
Dizzee said:
160gb of music?? wow, thats ALOT of music!!

ok, so first off a 250gb @ 5400rpm will not be any faster than 120gb @ 5400rpm
it will simply just have more space.

as for SSD, you can get a 16gb card to go in your express slot, but its around $200

and what you are talking about with turbo memory (robson) is completly differnt than hybrid harddrives, turbo memory relates to ram, not storage

now here is my question, do you really need all 160gb of music on your laptop?
why not put your fav music on it 20-30gb or so. and keep the rest on an external...

can you even listen to 160gb of music in a lifetime?? lol

acording to intel SR can use all 8gb of ram (when it becomes avaliable)
Click to expand...
Well, if it have higher density plates it will be faster, and even if it doesn't but instead have two of them (or four, whatever is more than the smaller one) it will probably also be faster. Accesstime will be the same thought.

I'd get a hybrid/SSD disk instead and hope for faster speeds and use an external 750GB or whatever disk thru firewire instead. But you say you don't care that much about speed and always want your stuff so just go big then.

(more platters will run hotter thought, and a SSD-disk probably use both less electricity and doesn't get as hot, not to mention it's much faster, I don't know how reliable they will be thought, in run times they are supposed to be great, but in number of writes? With ZFS atleast you would know you had corrupt files ;D)
 

Yeah, me too want some more spaces for my SR MPB(I got the standard version like you), because after iWork,OS X,bootcamp and XP SP2, I only got 60.71 GB left.
But after some thinking, I decided to wait until the 250 GB(5400 rpm)comes to a reasonable price to open my machine for it's not that easy to upgrade as a MacBook.One hardrive upgrade is enough for the MBP.
You can first try a 120G external hardrive now, and go to 250G in the future,and make your favorite music in your Mac.120G is not expensive nowadays:)
 
Buy a portable USB hard drive.

I have one that is 2.5" and plugs into and is powered off the USB port.

00000116392-EDGETechDiskGO1MiniPortableHardDrive-large.jpeg


That is an example of one - they vary in size, I have a 160GB one and it was only about $170.

Works a treat.
 
Kilamite said:
Buy a portable USB hard drive.

I have one that is 2.5" and plugs into and is powered off the USB port.

That is an example of one - they vary in size, I have a 160GB one and it was only about $170.

Works a treat.
Click to expand...

I think that you meant to put this picture instead:

portable-backup-hard-drive.gif


The picture you have is of a 1" drive and the maximum capacity is only 12 GB.

Both drives look pretty slick, I like Edge's design.
 
Yeh well the picture was an example of a portable drive.

There is a Firewire portable 2.5" drive out there too by Iomega if you are after faster read/write speeds. I own the Iomega 160GB USB drive and it works a treat.

That is your best option - also means that if you want to transfer music onto another computer it is a doodle to do so.
 
While the SR processor would support 8GB of RAM, the current Macbook Pro's memory controller only supports 1GB and 2GB SO-DIMMs. Thus, the MBP will *not* be upgradable to 8GB. See this.
 
I also wish I could keep my itunes library on my mbp, I went from a 500gb 24" imac to a 160gb 2.4ghz mbp. My solution was just to plug in my hard drive to my airport extreme, though there are bugs at time.. Mainly uploading new tracks into itunes, and lagging under front row it's not so bad heh. But other than that it works perfect, no problems with syncing my phone or ipod… and it works great when I move my mbp from my desk to my tv and use front row to play movies/tv shows through the hdtv…

Now I just need to save for a raid set up >_<
 
jrodatus said:
While the SR processor would support 8GB of RAM, the current Macbook Pro's memory controller only supports 1GB and 2GB SO-DIMMs. Thus, the MBP will *not* be upgradable to 8GB. See this.
Click to expand...

That does not mean anything at all and the MBP SR should be able to use 2 4GB memory modules. The link you provided just shows what Apple "officially supports" at release time. All Apple computers have a "release time" memory cap, but once larger memory modules come out, those computers normally will accept and use them. We won't know for sure if the SR MBP will see 8GB of RAM until someone gets 2 4GB chips and tries it, but I don't see any reason why it would not work.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back