MBP 15" 2.4GHz - 5400rpm vs 7200rpm HDD?

I intend to buy a 2.4GHz 15" 4GB RAM MBP. I am in a fix right now about going for which of the two HDDs 5400rpm vs 7200rpm (both of 200GB). The MBP with the default configuration(ie with 5400rpm) is for only 1699$ due to some stock clearance offer at my educational store. But, if I go for the 7200rpm the machine will cost me $1799+98, implying more $200. I intend to buy the extra 2GB RAM separately. Is it really worth it spending more 200$ on the 7200rpm HDD in my machine? I am a performance freak, and being a computer graduate student end up spending most of the time on my machine. Anyone who has used both the machines, please let me know if there is any noteworthy difference? I do understand that the decision is my personal one; but, please throw some insight and help me in making a decision quickly.

I bought a 7200rpm 100GB drive with my mbp. About a week ago I upgraded to a 7200rpm 320GB drive because I needed the space. If you, like me, are a performance freak, go with the 7200. I did and never regretted it. In fact i dealt with the space issue by buying a 500GB and a 1TB external (FW800). Because the new current MBPs use a 3.0gbps SATA interface, getting the 5400rpm might give you a bottle neck.
this is what i have now:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/momentus/momentus_7200.3/
original was the momentus 7200.1
If you compare the 5400.5 and the 7200.3 you'll see that there is a 20MB/s difference is sustained transfer rates. Considering the 300MB/s transfer rate of the 3.0 SATA interface, you will notice a difference. SATA likes 10k rpm plus, 5400 just doesn't cut it anymore. If you don't care about voiding the warranty, go to newegg and get the 7200.3 320GB. I got mine for about $175ish OEM (can't remember). Then turn your old one into an external.
Oh, and this thread is off limits for bickering about the differences between mebibytes, megabytes, and megabits.

Similar Messages

5400rpm or 7200rpm? - MBP 2011 17''

Hi people!
I will buy an MBP 17'' but...
I don't know if I should choose 5400rpm or 7200rpm hard-drive.
I am developer and I want good mobility...good battery autonomy.
With 5400rpm, mac have 7 hours browsing... but with 7200rpm drive, how much i will have? 6,5 hours?
7200rpm makes much difference in terms of performance, heating, battery?
15'' model has Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500Gb...
What are drives from 15'' and 17'' from 750Gb 5400rpm or 500Gb 7200rpm?
Thanks!
Sorry for my bad english...

Unfortunately the drive mfgrs. don't agree. Both variations carry the same MTBF estimations. Power consumption of the 7200 variant is usually between .1-1.0 watts depending upon the operating state: idle, startup, read, write. Heat generation is also negligible although the 7200 RPM variant may be warmer during heavy usage like doing a backup or restore. However, 7200 RPM drives are faster, and more so than just minor. Realizing the difference, however, depends a lot on the rest of the hardware. Put a fast drive in a USB box and it's slow. Firewire it's faster. But both interfaces are saturated before the drive can reach its potential. If the drive's SATA interface supports 3.0 Gb/s then putting it in a machine whose controller only supports 1.5 Gb/s will prevent the drive from reaching its potential. And this only deals with the basic interface.

7200RPM HDD in 15" MBP (Merom)?

I'm not realy sure if this is the right place for this, but really none of the catagories fit what I'm asking. Basically, I wanted to know if anyone has found a way to get a 7200RPM HDD installed in the Merom-based MBP lately? I know technically, if I wanted it that badly, I could do it myself. But, honestly, I'm a lot more comfortable working on desktops (AMD desktops, at that) than I am mobiles, and I'd rather not have to worry about it. I see the option is available for the 17" - curious if, despite it not being on the site, someone had any advice or input on my chances of getting one put in from the factory? I'm REALLY tempted to get one, but this is kind of a buy-or-don't-buy point for me.
Thanks in advance!
Custom Win/AMD64 Windows XP Pro

If you're worried about it, do not do the install. Despite how difficult/easy it may be for some, if you all ready think it might be a problem don't risk destroying your new $3,000 machine.
There had to be a reason they did not put the 7200 drive in the 15" and since we know heat is a problem it is reasonable to assume they ran tests with the 15" and determined the heat was just too bad (as many current 15" owners have said themselves). I would just get the 15" with the 5400 drive if I were you.

New Iris graphics on newest MBP 13in 2.4ghz fast enough? Any lag?

So I've been googling my heart out trying to find anyone who has bought the new MBP 13in 2.4ghz (any ram/hdd combo) and reported on this or not, and have yet to find any that didn't say "it SHOULD be totally smooth" (or the like). I bought my first MBA in September, but then found out about the October event, so I returned it in case the new MBP fit what I wanted better (although the battery life was absolutely amazing on the air).
The final decision maker for me between buying another 13in Air, or going for the 13in MBP, is if the new Iris graphics can push the retina display without lag consistently. I read about the 2012 retina models with the intel 4000 onboard graphics lagging for people due to it not being powerful enough. I prefer the 13in model because it's size works best for what I need, and both just fit into what I can afford, so the 15in is off the table.
Can anyone who has purchased the based MBP model comment on if the scrolling and general experience is smooth, or if they are experiencing any lag? This will be my first macbook, and want the best experience I can get (for what I can afford obviously). If the base MBP isn't strong enough for retina, I have no problem getting the Air with amazing battery life and still good screen quality, but I believe at 9hrs of battery and retina, the new MBP would fit the perfect balance for me of battery vs display quality.
I went into the apple store yesterday to judge for myself if retina makes enough of a difference to make it a second option (versus just getting the Air), and the retina is beautiful. I thought the Air's screen looked great until I played on the retina for a bit, the colors look great, and for some reason, I've very anal about the quality of my fonts, and they just looked amazing on the MBP. The reason I have turned to the community here is that, sure I did some very minor testing, but a little while in the store going through their demos isn't quite the same as someone who has used it for days in real life. Obviously I can return one if I'm not satisfied and get the other, but who wants to get a computer setup the way they want, only to run into problems and return it a few days later.
If this has been asked already, I apologize and if you could point me to that thread, I would be grateful.

You should also ask this in the MacBook Pro forum. This is the forum for the 13” white and black plastic MacBooks that were discontinued in 2010. You should also post this question there to increase your chances of getting an answer.
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro

Noticeable difference between 5400RPM and 7200RPM?

I am just wondering if anyone notices a large difference in loading times, games, etc. between the 5400RPM and 7200RPM hard drives? I am a bit worried with movie editing and music, gaming, etc. Thanks.

Yes, well sort of. I upgraded my 5400 RPM drive to a 7200 RPM drive and the difference is very noticeable. Some 5400 RPM drives are slower than others some are faster..same for 7200 RPM drives. So if you go from a slow 5400 RPM drive to a fast 7200 RPM drive the difference is very noticeable.

13'' MBP (2012 mid) can't recognize new hdd: HITACHI 5K1000 1T

MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY
I'm using a MBP 13'' 2012 mid.
My original HDD is down, so I bought a HGST(HITACHI) 5K1000-1000 1TB (HTS541010A9E680) 6.0 Gb/s , but after I installed the hdd, the system could not recognize the new hdd at all. So I run a recovery partition from a external driver, nothing appears in Disk Utility except recovery partition.
But if i connect the new hdd through USB-HDD cable, everything is ok.
PS: I've tried a old SUMSANG sata hdd, it works fine with my MBP.

Thanks for responsing.
You're welcome...
but the fact is my old Samsung working fine in the internal bay, my crashed original hdd can at least be detected from internal bay. how can the hard drive cable be broken.
Some drives will work with a faulty SATA cable - some won't. The fact that you can't boot with the HGST suggests that the SATA cable is faulty/defective.
Is it true that MBP 13'' 2012 mid has compatibility issue with 6.0Gb/s SATA III ?
Not that I've heard - that's why I suspect the cable. SATA III is just more 'demanding'.
BTW, I got your reply but NOT on the board - it's been happening a lot, for me, lately...
Clinton

7200RPM HDD slower than 5400RPM

I just bought a 13" Macbook Pro and I simply took my old HDD from my white macbook and put it in the new MBP and booted. Everything has been working fine except I've noticed its a little slow. I'm not sure if there is something or anything I can do aside from reloading the OS. Here are the xbench results. The 7200RPM should be faster but it definitely is not both in real world experience and according to this bench. My guess is it has something to do with the move from one macbook to another without reloading OSX.
Macbook pro (7200RPM drive)
FUJITSU MHW2160BJ G2
Disk Test 38.49
Sequential 63.06
Uncached Write 70.48 43.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 80.17 45.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 38.16 11.17 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 94.62 47.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 27.70
Uncached Write 9.20 0.97 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 72.39 23.18 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 76.99 0.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 111.99 20.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]
White Macbook (5400rpm drive from MBP)
Hitachi HTS545016B9SA02
Disk Test 46.25
Sequential 95.20
Uncached Write 103.13 63.32 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 100.16 56.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 72.28 21.15 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 117.66 59.13 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 30.54
Uncached Write 11.09 1.17 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 68.20 21.83 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 60.63 0.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 104.13 19.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Thanks for any help!

If you cloned like that and got all of your hardware working you're pretty lucky I would say. To give you an example - take an install drive from say my old Macbook (2007 Whitebook) and pop it into my MBP with the dual graphics cards... It boots, it works.....But can I switch graphics cards? No chance.
It's stuff like that that's your issue here.
Until you have a known good install it's impossible to fault find such things like as being asked. In my opinion anyways. If you have weird stuff going on that you can't bottom often it's a case of making sure stuff is right. Dropping one drive from one platform into another is not one of those right things.
In defence of all things Apple though - just try that on a Windows laptop and see how far it gets you

Should I buy 2.4 GHz MBP with 5400RPM or 7200RPM HD?

Hi,
I'm about to buy a MBP for the purposes of 3D software (primarily Sketchup), Photoshop, video editing and some Windows based software such as AutoCAD. Chances are I will need to run some of these simultaneously using Windows on Parallels.
The question is, is it really going to make a big difference I go for the 7,200RPM HD? Is this something I might just decide to upgrade later? I heard the 7,200RPM HDs are likely to make the machine run hotter (makes sense)... Is this true? Is it more likely to cause problems I've heard about such as warping the laptop's body?
Any quick advice on this would be much appreciated (as I'm in HK until tomorrow, where I can get it particularly cheap - but I'd have to order the 7,200RPM one, which is more hassle...)
Many thanks,
Alex

a 7200rpm drive will be faster, there's no doubt about that. Just think if that wasn't the case all computers including desktops would still be using 5400rpm drives.
Now depending on what you do will dictate the how much of a speed boost you'll benefit from the upgrade. Normal users, web surfing office apps will see the biggest boost at bootup but then most apps will operate as they would on a 5400rpm.
Move on to more of the higher end applications like Photoshop, motion, aperture and you start seeing a bigger difference in speed.
For me, I opted not go with the 7200 drive, mostly because I didn't want to go the CTO route and while I use photoshop and aperture the speed difference matter little to me.

250GB 5400rpm HDD vs 200GB 7200rpm HDD

Is there really a big difference between the two? The obvious is that one has more storage space and the other is faster, but is the difference that noticeable? Basically I'm using the MBP for media, music, and photo/video editing.

Personally I'd take the faster option, however if space would really be limited from your video editing activities then obviously take the larger drive. Access times have improved, but when it comes down to pure performance benchmarks the faster drives usually always come out on top. Not saying by leaps and bounds, but enough for some noticeable improvements in some situations.
In fact, when comparing my drive xBench results with those of the Air with SSD option, my drive beat the SSD in every single test by noticeable figures except for one (un-cached random write speed test), however mine was double that of the SSD in the un-cached sequential write test. Mine is the Hiatachi 200GB, 7200 rpm with 16GB cache.

Seagate 500Gb 5400RPM - Seagate 7200RPM

My problem is pretty much sorted now, but I thought others may be interested in my experiences. Essentially I upgrade from a Macbook to a Macbook Pro UniB 2.4Ghz - I put in a WD 320Gb 7200RPM drive, and then later upgraded that to a 5400RPM Seagate 500Gb.
Anyways, I wasn't too happy with the performance of the machine... Random pauses, generally a little lethargic. Anyways, I've now put in a Seagate 7200RPM unit and the transformation is massive - it almost makes me think there's something wrong with the 5400RPM unit... But I can't find anything screwey with it. For what it's worth it's now in a Dell unit and seemingly working well enough, and quickly. It's just not too great in the MBP?
Anyway, have a look here if you're interested: http://www.markc.me.uk/MarkC/Blog/Entries/2009/6/13Macbook_Pro_Hard_DiskUpgrade.html

I had a similar experience when I tried the Seagate 500 GB 5400-rpm drive in my MacBook Pro earlier this year. From my admittedly anecdotal observations, the drive seemed particularly slow on read access times. Also, I would occasionally get an odd UI stuttering effect when lots of data was being read from disk.
I found similar reports from other users on the forums at NewEgg.com. Reports on various tech sites (e.g. Tom's Hardware) seemed to confirm that read access times were around 19 ms, compared to 15 or 16 ms for many other drives. A difference of 3-4 ms might not seem like much, but it is apparently noticeable.
A week later, I switched to the Western Digital 500 GB 5400-rpm drive and the problem disappeared immediately.
Now I'm running the Seagate 500 GB 7200-rpm drive in my new MacBook Pro, which also seems quite snappy, perhaps even more so than the Western Digital. My only complaint is that the 7200-rpm drive also produces more vibration in the MacBook Pro's unibody chassis. But I expected as much and am slowly learning to live with it for the sake of performance.
-Dennis

5400rpm or 7200rpm for Macbook with leopard?

I am getting a good deal on Samsung's 250GB 5400rpm drive but I hear some people say 5400rpm is not good for leopard and is slow. But some folks also say 7200rpm gets hot on macbooks and is noisy.
So I am really confused and would like to know what other macbook users say about them. I would really appreciate your inputs. Thanks!
Message was edited by: life4rent
null

ipod_user wrote:
there are always good and bad points to everything, in this case they are quite even...
as the current macbooks ship with 5400rpm HDD's, this definitely isn't that slow, and if using your computer for every day use, the difference between 5400prm and 7200rpm will be almost indistinguishable, also the macbook air ships with a 4200rpm HDD apple obviously dont think this is too slow to be acceptable for normal use.
Of course a newer 5400 RPM drive is going to have a faster transfer rate than an older 5400 RPM drive due to higher "areal desity" (how much data is capable of being stored per unit area) with newer platters.
the good point for the 5400 HDD is that the battery can last longer, because the disk moves slower therefore consuming less power.
I heard maybe a .5 watt typical difference with the latest drives of both types. Might mean a few more minutes battery life, but about the power usage of a USB device like a mouse or flash drive. I think just dimming the display would make a bigger difference. In addition, new drives are generally more efficient and a new 7200 RPM drive might have about the same power consumption as an older 5400 RPM drive.
the bad point mainly made for the 7200 HDD is the battery life, which can be significantly reduced, but the good point is that leopard and other programs will run faster...
The way I saw it was that it wouldn't really matter with me since my MacBook mostly sits on the coffee table plugged into the power adapter.
so, its your choice, speed over battery...
unless you are going to be using a lot of high powered programs the 5400 rpm HDD should be more than adequate
Certainly nothing wrong with it. I just put in a 7200 RPM drive to see if I could.

Best 7200RPM HDD for battery life

Anyone have any suggestions on the best 7200RPM hard drive for battery life? I think the one I have is draining the battery because it's the only thing I have changed. Even on 99% my battery indicator has never showed 7 hours, max I have ever seen is 5 so I assume its the hdd pulling the charge.

If you've only had this MBP for two days, have you even run the battery all the way down to see how long the battery actually lasts? What you see in the menu bar is only an estimate based on what you're doing with the computer at the time. It becomes somewhat more accurate over time (because it remembers your common use patterns) but it's never as meaningful as it seems. But if you haven't calibrated your battery yet, and you don't have enough experience with the machine to know how long your battery lasts in real life, you have nothing to be concerned about.

Change harddisk. 5400RPM or 7200RPM?

Hello there!
I'm waiting for my new MBP 13". I'm going to change harddisk for a large one. Should i stick for 5400 or 7200rpm? Will i get performance boost with 7200? What will happen to the battery time? Will a 7200 disk get hotter?
Thanks in advance!
Best regards
Johan

That's the one I was referring to - you want model ST9500420AS (no G on the end). It will fit in the 13" MBP (but it will only run at SATA-I speed, 1.5 Gbps, not SATA-II, 3.0 Gbps, since the 13" MBP is SATA-I).
Instructions for DIY HDD swap are on p. 37 of the manual:
http://manuals.info.apple.com/enUS/MacBook_Pro_13inchMid2009.pdf

MBP 15 (late 2011) Harddrive 750gb/7200rpm

Hello,
does anybody know wich brand/model (750gb/7200rpm) of harddrive is used in MBP 15" (late 2011).
Especially, I would be interested if the the 750gb/7200rpm HD is much noisier than the 500gb/5400rpm?
Thanks in advance!

I'm not sure, but in my early '11 MPB 13" the stock hard drive was made by Hitachi (it is a 320gb 5400 rpm).

(2011 13" Macbook Pro Model 8,1) I want to replace my 320GB HDD and replace it with a 6gb/s 120GB SSD. I also want to replace the optical drive with a 7200RPM HDD 750GB.

I want to use:
The SSD and enclosure to replace the optical drive with the new HDD
So basically, I want to use the SSD in the link above. I want to set this up as either preferrably a fusion drive. If not the smoothest most stable configuration. I have a Macbook Pro Early 2011 13" with 8 GB of ram, 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5, 320GB HDD.
I want to install the SSD directly to the SATA port where the 320 GB HDD is currently. I then want to install the new HDD, preferrably a name brand 750 GB 7200RPM hard drive where the optical drive is now. I want the storage to work in a way in which the OS, and my most used programs and files get stored on the SSD, and everything else gets stored on the larger hard drive. My most preferred method would be Fusion drive, or a SPAN drive.
I would like to use a Seagate Momentus XT, but I learned that there might be issues with compatability with this. I dont mind using the 3 gb/s 500GB option, but would like to know if it would even be smart to do it. I also have no problem settling for a regular 7200 RPM hard drive.
I have read a bunch of stuff online but I still am not sure if this is even possible. I want my machine to run as fluid as possible so any info would be appreciated.

bump

MBP 15" 2.4GHz - 5400rpm vs 7200rpm HDD?

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