MacBook Pro :: Single SSD Vs SSD With 320GB 5400rpm Optibay (Performance Concern)?
Jun 21, 2010
I bought an i5 15" MBP last week and instantly through my 80GB SSD into it. I've been doing my best to keep a lot of unnecessary data off the SSD but I'm still running out of space. I'm thinking about throwing the stock 5400rpm 320GB drive into an Optibay tray and using that to hold the data. I use Photoshop and Illustrator quite a bit and I would like to use the 5400rpm drive as the scratch disk as well.
However, I'm not to familiar with read/write processes and I'm wondering if I will see a speed decrease if I use the 5400rpm drive to house the data while leaving the SSD open for the OS and all applications. Should I expect a noticeable decrease in battery life with both hard drives installed as well?
Now, I am in the market to replace my stock 160GB HDD in my MB, as I want a bigger hard drive in my PS3 and was thinking I could put the MB one in there, and buy a larger one for the MB.
I am debating between a 320GB 7200rpm and a 500gbrpm drive. I currently have this external drive:
[URL]
I HATE it. It takes a super long time to start up(close to 3-4 minutes) and then opening up videos takes a good 2-3 seconds. But, I have a 5400rpm drive inside the MacBook and was wondering if 7200rpm with 16mb cache would really make a significant difference in day-to-day use.
The thing is I dont really need 500gb of space. But from reviews Ive read that the 500gb is faster in some cases because of its higher platter density. Vibration /noise issues on the scorpio black 7200rpm sway me towards the scorpio blue 500gb as well.
Anyone had experience of either hard drive or both? (this will be for a 2.2Ghz MBP)
Is it true that when we charged 100% battery and it says on AC power, does it LITERALLY do what it say? i mean the power of Macbook pro is not provided by battery but by magsafe instead. is it?last thing, leaving the Macbook connected to the working magsafe isn't add numbers up to cycle count right? and is it okay to charge the Macbook pro all the time and only using it when we could't find AC power outlet?
I bought a new higher spec (MD322X/A) MBP three months ago (yeah, so I'm a newbie from Windows and didn't know how close WWDC was) that has 1GB of video memory. The About This Mac window reports 512MB of memory. I called JB where I bought it and the guy said this is fine and it will report 1GB in system properties, which it does appear to but I'm not yet convinced that all is well. So, apart from paying 3 months ago what I could have bought a retina display for today, is it normal to report 512MB in the About This Mac window if I have 1GB? Also, after the spontaneous purchase of the MBP because JB didn't have a new iPad in stock, they don't appear to be that much cheaper than other retailers anyway?
I recently bought a used MBA, I always want one when it first came out, finally wait until now because of the big price drop My first mod to my MBA is to upgrade the hard drive. I wasn't pay much attention when I purchase this replacement hard disk, didn't notice the MBA only takes 5mm height, as most 1.8" in the market are 8mm. But since it's in my hand right now, I decided to put it on see if the MBA recognizes it. Not too much surprise, leopard installation went very smoothly. After the installation, the available space is about 95gb. And because of the 5400rpm, it feels faster.
Too bad the bottom won't close because of the height of this drive. But at least this gives me an idea, and I know there's a Toshiba 1.8" 120gb 4200rpm 5mm out there, and it should fits perfectly in MBA. Anyway, I'm still debating myself rather getting this Toshiba drive or a Samsung 32gb SSD(Same drive as used in the Rev.A SSD version, but different capacity) As the price of these two drives are pretty much the same (around $150 range) I have another computer for my main work, so I'm toward getting a 32gb SSD
I've seen a few of these threads but I need more information.
5400rpm HDD is a bit slower but uses less power.
Exactly how much power is lost to upgrading? I know its not much but its important. The 7200rpm upgrade is like an extra 40 GBP or if I downgrade the spec to a 320gb its cheaper than the 5200rpm 500gb.
If I get 4 hours of battery life on a 5400rpm, how long would a 7200rpm last? Is there a loss of an hour? or a mere 15 minutes?
I am looking at buying a 15" MBP next weekend. I was nearly set on the i7 model with the high res AG screen, but now I am looking at other configurations and am wondering if that is the best choice.
I'll be doing a lot of coding but I do that fine on my 1st gen macbook, so I am not worried about performance in that regard.
The main thing I am thinking of is video editing with Premier Pro CS5. If I get the i5 I can upgrade the hard drive to the 7200 RPM version which I think will get me better performance on editing HD video than the i7 will as it will be accessing the hard drive a lot for the video. Will the performance boost of the 7200 RPM beat out the i7 in video production?
Also I am wondering about battery life, I have heard that the i7 gets around 4.5 hours in normal usage. That is fine but will the i5 + 7200 get more than that or about the same? (Not while editing video, just web browsing, email, maybe photoshop)
Anyone have any thoughts on this? or any experience editing video with the i5 or i7 mbp?
I have a year old 15' MBP, with a 2.66GHz C2D, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB 5400RPM drive. I just purchased a 250GB Seagate 7200RPM drive which I use in an external enclosure for my Time Machine. I have no complaints for my computer being terribly slow, but I was wondering if I would get a significant boost from having the 7200RPM drive in my MBP. Before anyone recommends that I get a SSD, I do plan on buying one once prices keep dropping. Right now $1600 for a 480GB OWC SSD is a little steep for me.
It's been a looong time since I've posted on these forums, it's good to be back though! I have just dug out my old white MacBook- specs are as follows:1.83GHz Core Duo 1.25GB RAM 60GB 5400RPM HDD Put simply, this thing is really starting to chug! Modern websites such as eBuyer, engadget etc cause the HD to go crazy and it's generally pretty slow, even when doing 'simple' things like making powerpoint presentations.
Got a MPB 13". I need a good external drive, but I'm wondering which is the data bottleneck: FW800 or 5400RPM?
The reason I ask is I have an old iMac with FW400 and an external Hitachi 7200RPM 200GB 16MB cache in an OWC case that's (suppesedly) capable of FW800. It seems to have taken the same amount of speed to restore a very large file to my iMac (FW400) vs. my new MBP (FW800).
I would like to replace this drive with something bigger, but if FW800 is the bottleneck, then I'm thinking I should just get a 5400RPM drive to both save money and get a larger drive.
I know that it is an old single processor, first of the Power Macs, legacy machine and OS. I have gone through all various check system/disk evolutions with Apple and TechTool Utilities.Also, when I have a software glitch, I can never get the Send To Apple report to "send". I get a message that reads something along the line of 'not being able to connect to Apple'. Why, the legacy problem again? If so, I am suprized that I get iTunes and Safari updates.
Info: PowerMac G5/1.8 GHz old 1 cpu 2003, Mac OS X (10.5.6), Using Macs since Skinny Mac, and Apple IIs before that
recently installed and flashed a sapphire 4890 into my mac pro 1,1.Installed Quartz update for 10.6.4, running dual displays no problems BUTTTTT.......something seems fishy about my open gl scores.Most of the people I've seen on here are scoring over a 1000 when benchmark is check in open gl viewer
I had an issue with the 9600m GT Graphics card a few weeks ago where the graphics card wouldn't display anything when plugged into an external monitor. The apple store checked it out and said the logic board was faulty and that it would need to be replaced under warranty. (Late 2008 15" macbook pro).
When I received the laptop back, they not only replaced the logic board, but they also replaced the SSD with a 250gb 5400rpm hard drive. I called in and, after being upgraded to the top level supervisor, he said that all of the hard drives being replaced were sent to be refurbished or recycled and that my hard drive had a fault in it so they replaced it. He says that they restore it to the apple original condition and originally they sold it with a 250gb hard drive in it so that's what they replaced it with. Their policy is that only if they replace aftermarket ram with apple ram will they return the aftermarket parts back to you. This repair was conducted yesterday, the 15th of January by apple Tech ID #612525.
I don't expect to get my data back, but if anyone has any idea on how I can get my hard drive back, I'd be willing to reward $100. A new Intel SSD X25-M G2 would be around 250 so I wouldn't want to do that.
I've been on the phone all day with the apple support so I am very frustrated right now.
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?
So I decided to upgrade to this 7200.4 RPM 320 GB Seagate
[URL]
I wanted to know will I have to take off the enclosure off my current HDD and put it on the Seagate or do I just connect the SATA connector and that's it?
I recently put a 320gb drive into my macbook and partitioned it into 3 drives one for the OS, one for apps and one for data, eg photos, music etc. Is this necessary? It's what i do on windows based pc's but not sure whether i need to do this on the MAc in quite thae same way. Does anybody have any recomendations for partitionig this drive, i don't intend runnig bootcamp or similar, just snow leopard.
I recently upgraded my stock HDD to a SSD and moved the HDD into the optibay. I was hoping that using the command pmset -a disksleep 1 would mean the 5400rpm drive would go to sleep after 1 minute of inactivity and I would get nice SSD silence It usually does but something is making it spin up again all the time. I am hardly running anything on my MBP.
I think this has been discussed but can't find it. In a SSD+HDD setup, should I put the SSD in the primary bay or in the optibay (replacing the superdrive). I believe there is a setup that has issues with sleep or motion sensor whatever, but I can't recall what the preferred setup is.
so i'm going to be a freshman in college and have decided to buy a 13" Macbook Pro laptop. I'd be getting the cheapest one ($1199) and using it for the internet, writing papers, storing music and photos, and whatever else I may become interested in while i'm in college. My question is, when ordering, for $40 I can bump the hard drive up from 250GB to 320GB...is it worth it for what i'd be using the computer for?
I'm using a Corsair 120 GB Force SSD, a MCE OptiBay Kit, and a Hitachi 500 GB 7200 rpm drive. Everything works great when the SSD is in the hard drive bay, and the Hitachi is in the OptiBay. I'd prefer to swap the arrangement so the Hitachi can be protected by the sudden motion sensor, but when the SSD is in the OptiBay OS X won't recognize it. I've tried booting from the install disc to use Disk Utility, but it only shows the Hitachi drive as if the SSD isn't in the machine. I've throughly checked the installation; it appears correct, and as I said everything works fine with the drives swapped. I've also tried resetting the PRAM and the SMC, per the instructions in Apple's KB.
I am looking for optibay recommendations for my MBP 17" mid-2010. I am not sure which one to get. MCE offers one, which I have looked at, but they are pretty pricy at almost 100 bucks. Then I saw another website, [URL] selling optical bay caddies for almost half that (~50 dollar range); and lastly even some on eBay for the 12$ range from US sellers.
In need of a good video guide so i can get my optibay installed! I ordered the one from SMK something on ebay as per recommendations on searching this forum.
I have an SSD in place of the usual hard disk my MBP 13" came with to which i placed in the optibay. Since i did this (yesterday) ive noticed how noisy the drive is over just using the SSD alone.
Is there a way to either powerdown the optibay drive or 'eject' it when not in use for silence and prolonged battery life? Would you recommend it? Most of the time i will just use it as a netbook unless i download media to the optibay.
I had a problem with the computer not mounting the disc. But solved this by swapping the locations. ie put the old hard drive in the optibay holder into the superdrive. Put the new one in the native bay.
I copied my entire system onto the new disc in the native bay, and am booting from that as its faster. Its a 320gig 7200rpm disc. The old drive in the optibay/superdrive bay is 120gig 3200rpm.
Still having troubles like: occasional system freeze. Wake from sleep very slow. Sometimes 10 secs or more. Sometimes need to push power button.
The MacBook Pro is 2.26ghz 4gigs ram, only 1 or 2 gigs of my files on it. Up to date software (snow leopard 10.6.1).
MCE has virtually no tech support. Still waiting for a reply about why my disc didn't mount a week later (even though I already solved that).
Any ideas on why the bad performance?
Do you think the different speed drives is messing things up?
i've got an optibay installed in my uMBP for about 3 months now. In the optibay I have a 60 GB SSD, from which i boot. My other harddrive contains my OS X home folder & a bootcamp partition. I really love my setup, it's perfect for my, until I saw a buddy in my class boot his MBP: after he pressed the button, it took about 2 sec to show the apple logo. He doesn't have a SSD, and the exact same machine, and yet me manages to boot faster then me. (We also both have 10.6). I searched about this problem, and the only thing i could find was to make sure that your OS X partition is set as boot drive. Here is a screenshot of my boot drive menu: I found it strange that my bootcamp doesn't show up there. I always boot in bootcamp holding the alt key, not using this preference pane. Here is a video of my macbook booting: [URL] I found this ting called rEFIt?
