MBP Bigger Hard Disks in the Future?

[kdum8]

Hi, new to this forum and to macs.
I will be starting a Ph.D. next April and am thinking of leaving PCs behind and buying a 17 inch MBP, however the current max size HD that they ship with is 120GB. What is the general concensus that by next April they'll be bigger internal drives available for the 17inch? (I'm talking upto 200GB here). Even if Apple don't ship larger drives as an option how about buying one yourself? I tend to get through HDD space very quickly and never find it to be enough. I have externals sure, but need to carry quite a lot around too.

Thanks,

kilo delta uniform mike 8.

p.s. I know there have been some similar questions along this line before but they were a while ago and things have moved on.

 

[miles01110]

I'd say it's basically a guarantee that bigger drives will be available by April. You could always camp newegg for the latest Seagate release or something, internal 2.5'' drives can always be found on newegg before they appear in computers. Now that I think about it, that was a really obvious statement....oh well.

 

[NATO]

Apple have already started providing 160GB 2.5" Drives with the updated Mac mini, I reckon you'll see those being added to the MBP as a BTO option within a month. These new higher capacity drives are being achieved using perpendicular writing technology which is still pretty cutting edge and its pretty safe to say that capacities could reach 200GB+ in the next 12 months or so. However, given the current price premium of the 160GB drives, I'd say thats a big as you're realistically going to get for the forseeable future.

 

[twistedlegato]

I think we need a 3TB MBP

 

[generik]

There are some workarounds.. like using a larger external firewire drive to hold stuff such as your iTunes music library (which you probably won't need when you are on the move since you already got your iPod!) etc.

Laptops are pretty limited sadly, even with the large 160GB drives... they are still pathetic compared to what desktops get these days.

 

[thebeephaha]

Keep only the essentials on the internal drive, leave the rest on an external. I don't need all 20 thousand of my photos, and all 80 gigs of movies with me wherever I go..

 

[Steve Jobless]

fwiw you should look into mozilla firefox and its plug-in called gspace, its free and allows you to upload at least 2.5 GB per account on their servers and you can easily download from it at any time, while it may be time consuming and tedious, just remember its free.

right now i have about 7 GB worth of important files split on three accounts

 

[thebeephaha]

fwiw you should look into mozilla firefox and its plug-in called gspace, its free and allows you to upload at least 2.5 GB per account on their servers and you can easily download from it at any time, while it may be time consuming and tedious, just remember its free.

right now i have about 7 GB worth of important files split on three accounts

Then when the website dies for whatever reason it all goes poof...

HMMM... I'd be scared of that too much. I'd rather burn like oh.. 2 DVDs and then duplicate those than take the time to upload all that.

 

[XP Defector]

Like people have said, most laptop users need a (firewire, preferably) external hard drive. My MacBook only has 60GB intenerally, and though this is subject to change once I save for a Hiatachi Travelstar (160GB), it is not really a massive problem. I just keep a limited (10GB) selection of my musicstore on there, applications obviously and a few GIGs of photos. Though it would certainly be nice to have a 500GB internal in my MacBook

 

[mikesk8]

Like people have said, most laptop users need a (firewire, preferably) external hard drive. My MacBook only has 60GB intenerally, and though this is subject to change once I save for a Hiatachi Travelstar (160GB), it is not really a massive problem. I just keep a limited (10GB) selection of my musicstore on there, applications obviously and a few GIGs of photos. Though it would certainly be nice to have a 500GB internal in my MacBook

I hope that new MBP release will have min 100gb as a standard; yeah...160gb is perfect and affordable

 

[NATO]

With the switch to Intel, there's a greater pressure on our poor hard drives to run Windows either via Parallels, Boot Camp (or both!), meaning 10-20GB instantly disappearing once you create your partition/virtual HDD.

You can never have too much hard drive space. Ever

 

[thebeephaha]

The thing with bigger HDD's is there are 160's out there to be had but their slightly slower than the 100gig 7200 RPM drive, 160 may have perpendicular technology but its still only 5400 RPM, and for me load times are already slow enough on my 100gig 7200... Which has tested as the fastest laptop sata drive out there right now. For me speed is more important than internal storage.

If you don't need speed, there are options.