MacBook Pro Hard Drive Suggestions
jdryan3
Registered Users Posts: 1,353 Major grins
I'm moving to a MacBook Pro 15" from an old Sony Vaio PC. I'm looking at upgrading from the 120 GB 5400rpm drive to the 160GB 5400rpm drive.
But I would like to hear opinions, however, on using PS CS3 on the the 160GB 5400rpm vs the 7200rpm.
And if anyone has experience with the even larger but slower 200GB 4200rpm drive, it would be greatly appreciated. Does the better processor & 2GB RAM compensate for such a slow drive in large (70+MB) PSD files.
(I had posted this in "Andy's Unoffical Mac Thread" but created a separate thread hoping to stoke some responses. Hopefully no mods are offended) :uhoh
But I would like to hear opinions, however, on using PS CS3 on the the 160GB 5400rpm vs the 7200rpm.
And if anyone has experience with the even larger but slower 200GB 4200rpm drive, it would be greatly appreciated. Does the better processor & 2GB RAM compensate for such a slow drive in large (70+MB) PSD files.
(I had posted this in "Andy's Unoffical Mac Thread" but created a separate thread hoping to stoke some responses. Hopefully no mods are offended) :uhoh
"Don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to. Oh well."
-Fleetwood Mac
-Fleetwood Mac
0
Comments
I there!
I faced the same question when buying my MBP. Here is what I found out:
pro 7200 Drive:
- The responsiveness of the MBP will be notacibly be better (for example
when initialy starting applications) because the drive has a shorter seek
time.
- Lage ammounts of data are read/written much faster. You wont notice
it in Office applications, but if you are working with Video or Audio editing
you will.
con 7200 Drive:
- Price
- Not as silent during disk reads/writes as 5400 Drives, but nobody had an issue with it.
pro 5400 Drive:
- Its much cheaper than the 7200 and a little less noisy during disk access
- Some people report it doesn't drain the batterly like the 7200 model,
others said it doesnt. So I'm not sure about this one.
con 5400 Drive:
-
pro 4200 Drive:
- its availabe in 200GB from Apple. (But there are 200GB 7200 Drives and
now also a 250GB/5400 Version on the market. Question is if you are brave
enough to void your warranty buy upgradeing your MBP yourself or if are
willing to spend the cash (~200$ ?) for Apple to replace the disk for you.)
con 4200 Drive:
- the performance dropoff from 5400 to 4200 is huge. You will notice longer
boot times and (almost) unbarable responsiveness during some tasks.
- since reading/writing to the drive takes longer, you batteries will drain
as fast as with a 5400 drive.
A common suggestion was to get an external firewire drive with 7200rpm
for disk intensive applications (Video editing etc.) Even with FW400 you will
get transferspeeds of something like 40-50MB/s.
I decided to go for the MBP 2.2Ghz and 2GB RAM and 160GB/5400 Disk
mainly because of the priceing structure from Apple. For editing single
Photos (which takes place in RAM anyway) the disk speed is almost
neglectible. My Photo Library resides on an external 500GB FW Drive
which is in my eyes a super solution. I can browse through 10MP photos
very fast and load them faster into ps than from my laptop drive. If I'm
not at home downloading photos to the MB and editing from there also
works good, just not exactly as fast.
I hope that helped a bit. If you google a bit you will find many forum
discussions about this topic as well as actual speed comparisons reviews.
― Edward Weston
I was buying fast drives for my PC since I had topped out on RAM and processor - one honking fast, separate scratch disk. But with extra RAM, dual core processor and what I read about CS3 on the Intel chip, maybe another extrernal FW would be the way to go (I actually have a 400GB Seagate Firewire Drive now). David TO had mentioned doing that on one of my earlier posts. Or I spend the extra $250 getting 4GB non-Apple RAM.
EDIT: OOPS! My Bad. I forgot the standard drive on the 15" 2.2 GHz is the 120GB - still gotta special order for 160GB.
-Fleetwood Mac