MacBook Pro :: Hard Drive Speed - Noticeable Difference
Oct 24, 2009
I know this topic has been gone over several times, but I'm still having trouble deciding on which to get in a new 15", 2.8Ghz MBP - 5400/500GB, or 7200rpm/320GB (or 500, really). I'll be using the machine largely for graphic design, but also for various other tasks as my main computer. I've heard the faster drive IS a noticeable difference, but it also drains battery life and runs hot. There doesn't seem to be a consensus on this anywhere. Is the 7200 worth it?
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Apr 6, 2010
I'm looking to replace my current external drive with a newer, larger drive. My current drive is connected via Firewire and houses my iTunes library, plus movie files, documents, etc. I'm trying to decide between a portable drive (the Western Digital Passport, for example), and another desktop drive (like say, this one [URL:..]Questions I have:
- Is there any reason to be concerned about longevity when using a portable drive?
- Does a desktop drive typically perform better than a desktop drive?
- Is there a noticeable speed difference between USB 2.0 and Firewire?
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Mar 16, 2009
For almost the last year I have been using an Airport Extreme on 2.4b/g and and Airport express in my room to extend my wireless network. I also have a usb hdd configured to back up my macbook using time machine. Well I have a new roommate moving in and he has his own extreme and two expresses.
I have some questions on what would be the best way to consolidate our networking devices. I considered us selling our extremes and getting the new time capsule so both of our macs can use 5ghz while my girlfriends dell uses the 2.4.
Is there a noticeable speed difference between time capsule backup vs hard drive to extreme connected via usb?
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Nov 21, 2010
I'm thinking about upgrading my 5400 rpm hard drive. Is there a big difference in performance/battery life between 5400 and 7200 rpm?
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Apr 15, 2010
Aside from more screen real estate which is not that important to me, will i really notice the difference between std and hi res glossy in the 15" MBP? I am coming from a late 2007 core 2 2.2 ghz system that I mostly used for photoshop work, email, web surfing and for watching movies once in awhile, so I think for me the deciding factor comes down to will the the hires display have a significant enough difference over the std display on my photos?
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Jun 13, 2012
I see its $250 extra to top-off the CPU for a 100mhz boost. Does anything else change like cache? I find the upgrade price unreasonable.
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Oct 24, 2010
I did some searching on this topic but couldn't really find any info. I have a 2006 24" iMac with a 250gb HD. I just upgraded the ram to 3gb and have done a fresh install of snow leopard but my machine still seems to struggle with applications and accessing files. I was looking at replacing it with either a WD Caviar Black or a Samsung Spinpoint 1tb. the extra space is not my biggest concern, just wondering about performance increases?
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Dec 1, 2009
I have a 1,1 Mac Pro. Am I going to see a good difference in performance? I mainly do motion graphics and Photoshop related tasks. Gaming is secondary. Just wondering what your guys' thoughts are and if it's worth the price upgrade.
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May 24, 2012
I'm looking to buy a new MacBook Pro and am unsure of the real differences between the ATA hard drives available and the SSDs. How would each affect my new computer? I realize many people suggest not buying these extra things through Apple for economical reasons, but lets just say I did, which would be the better option?
Info:
MacBook Pro
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May 21, 2010
I'm using Data Rescue III on a USB powered hard drive with and it's taking a very long time with my iMac G5... It says 42,291 hours remaining (about 5 years) If I did it on my Mac Pro would it go faster, or is the recovery speed based on the hard drive speed?
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Jul 24, 2009
Whats the difference between a PATA hard drive and an ATA hard drive?
I bought one of ebay for my 15" Powerbook, i got it today, and it doesn't work lol. But the post clearly says, will work with all ibook's, and Powerbooks, So im not sure if it's the right kind of drive. The HD i ordered is on route for a replacement, so hopefully it was just a defective drive.
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Apr 12, 2009
i have a 1.5 Mbps AT&T DSL connection, and multiple speed tests show a download speed of 1.2 Mbps (and 200 Kbps upload). when i download files, such as software updates from Apple, various podcasts, and even Silverlight from Microshaft, the speed is always between 140 - 160 Kbps. i contacted AT&T, and the rep said it was because of buffering by the servers i was receiving the files from. is this a reasonable explanation? is this an accurate use of the term "buffering"?
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Mar 10, 2009
I'm sitting here thinking I made a mistake by being cheap and just upgrading the base model to 2 GB when virtually everyone else is going for 4 GB... I do realize that this is mainly because most people choose to upgrade themselves, and then there's no point in not installing 4 GB. The thing is that I don't think I would benefit at all from having 4 instead of 2 GB of memory, since I won't be doing any "heavy" work on it whatsoever.
I might use Photoshop now and then, but that's about it, and that works just fine on my current MacBook with 2 GB ram (white 2006 model). Also, my memory usage most often shows that I have 1,2 GB of free memory, which isn't even close to "maxing" it. I've been looking for benchmarks comparing these two configurations, but I couldn't find any. I know that it's quite easy to upgrade it yourself later, but I'd rather avoid it...
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Sep 19, 2010
I just bought a new Mac Pro 6-core and an OWC 120Gb SSD drive. My question is putting the SSD on optical drive bay or Hard disk drive bay, is there any difference in performance? My understanding from my old PC is never to share the SATA cable with the optical drive as it will take the transfer speed of the optical drive, because they are running in the same "channel"?Is the 2 SATA cable in the optical drive bay 2 separate distinct ports/channel?
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Jun 30, 2009
I just received my new macbook pro 17" and I want to verify the hard drive is a 7200 rpm drive, how can I find that information and/or test the hard drive speed.
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Aug 27, 2009
I own a 1st generation MacBook Core Duo (black) with 80GB Fujitsu at 1.5 Gigabit/s. I want to replace this with a compatible hard drive. Will this - Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD3200BEVT 320GB 5400 RPM 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive - work in my laptop? I notice that it has a 3.0Gb/s speed versus my current Fujitsu 1.5Gb/s. I'm using Tiger, if this matters.
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Mar 3, 2010
I am desperately waiting on the MacBook Pro refresh. I plan on buying my first MBP, a major upgrade from my grandma's iBook G4 I am currently using. I had a question about hard drive speed. I know that 7200RPM is quite a bit faster than 5400RPM, but what about battery life. I need it to get me through a day of school, 4-8 hours. My question to you is: would it be worth the extra $50 or so to upgrade to a 7200RPM HD, and what would the effects on battery life be? In your own experiences with current MBPs. I've thought about going with a SSD, but that might end up being too much, since I'm already paying quite a bit.
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Aug 16, 2010
I have a new macbook pro and after reading various threads I want to buy a gtech 320gb external drive. The only one I can track down is the firewire400. (at a reasonable price) The MB is FW800. will the FW400 work OK and is the speed significantly slower?
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Aug 22, 2009
I just switched out my 160GB hard drive on my 13" MBP for a 500GB. I do notice that things are a little slower now as far as opening up apps and such. Would upgrading to the 4GB of RAM instead of the 2 I have make a difference or is that the trade i get for running a 5200 500GB HD.
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Mar 30, 2012
I have an early 2009 macbook, with 320 GB hard drive and running OS Lion, after i upgraded my os to lion, the computer ran perfectly normal, although a little bit slower than running snow Leopard. However, recently I notice my mac become very slow, got rainbow wheel even when i open the safari. then I use the black magic to test the hard disk speed, it appears the read and write speed is only a little over 30mb/s.
i have recently change my keyboard at apple store, I notice my mac slow down after that, do you think it would related?
Info:
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.1)
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Oct 24, 2010
What is the difference in speed of opening apps?
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Mar 10, 2009
I notice that to upgrade the HDD from Apple is expensiva & many has posted picture on how they use a putty knife & replace them with a better & bigger capacity HDD.
I was wondering, for those not comfortable opening up the Mac Mini, what is the difference if we just buy a USB external HDD ? Wouldn't it be the same
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Dec 31, 2010
How much speed difference is there? Battery I take it is almost double in real life, actually using the MBA. I get barely 3 hours with moderate use on my Rev B and I take it most people get close to 7 with similar usage?
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Sep 6, 2009
Just wondering what the speed difference would be if i upgraded from 5400 to 7200 RPM? Is it worth it or perhaps is an external drive the way to go?
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Nov 1, 2009
Is it worth the extra cash to go up to the 2.13? I know it's a small amount, but that could be a new mouse, or a super drive. I've seen tests that indicate the rev b 1.86 is actually faster than the new 2.13. This will be my only personal mac. I'm a graphic designer (adobe cs4) but I don't do much design work on my personal computer (I have a nice iMac at work). The usual facebook, email, web browsing, YouTube
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Jun 5, 2009
I've been looking at a number of different Firewire 800 enclosures to use with my new Mac Mini and I have seen lots of complaints with almost all the enclosures that I have investigated, including the Newertech MiniStack v3 which I thought should be a good one. A recent enclosure I came across that I haven't seen any bad reviews about is the Icy Dock (MB559UEB-1S). I'd like to know if others are using this and what they think about it. The next question has to do with the type of hard drive to put into the enclosure. Is it worth getting a high performance drive, or will the Firewire 800 interface be the bottleneck even with an average speed drive?
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May 9, 2012
I recently picked up a 17" 2009 unibody MacBook Pro with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8ghz, 4gb RAM, SuperDrive and a Samsung 1TB hard drive. The system did not come with the original hard drive and I don't have any other hard drives to test and verify that the new larger hard drive is the cause. I have tried a clean install of Snow Leopard, Lion and even Mountain Lion but no matter what my fans always running at max speed (5k+ RPM). I have looked at iStat and the temps of any of the components in the machine never show more than 42*C so the fans should never be running at full blast. Oddly enough smcFanControl shows 0* temp but fan speds for both left and right are always 5.5k+ and very noisy. Using HDD Fan Control I am able to get at least the right fan to run at a controlable speed but its silence is drowned out by the left fan that still runs on full blast. I have already done multiple SMC resets and PRAM resets with no change in the condition. These noisey fans are driving me insane! I have run every available update as well. Is there a chance that the hard drive or something elses temp not being supported or detectable by OSX is causing the fans to default to the fail safe constant high speed?!
Info:
MacBook
Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 2.8GHz Core2Duo
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Jun 3, 2009
I have just received my new MBP 2.66. I upgraded my screen and hard drive to 7200. How do I check the speed of my drive. I have gone through all the usual places but can't find the speed anywhere.
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Dec 1, 2009
Alright, here's the situation. Last week I shut down my computer to go away for thanksgiving, and when I came back and turned on my 20" white intel imac my hard drive fan sounds like it is going max rpm. I have istat pro installed and the rpm for the HDD fan is showing it's at zero. Does anybody have a clue as to why this is happening? My computer was working fine when I last used it but now my fan is going crazy. It's really loud and i'm concerned my the life of my fan. Any suggestions on what to do would be great. I installed Snow Leopard after the problem occured, but it's still happening.
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Sep 22, 2006
Someone is selling me a powerbook, but I want to find out what the harddrive rpm speed is, they don't know what it is. Is there anyway to check using system profiler or something?
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