New Macbook Pro hard drive

TheEffect

I've just purchased a 7200rpm 500GB to replace the stock 5400rpm 250GB. Is the bump in speed going to hit the battery much?

KillerWatt

All depends on whether the new drive draws more power than the stock one.
If you want speed like you've never seen along with power consumption figures that will barely touch the battery, then move over to SSD (Solid State Disk).

Hammyman

KillerWatt wrote: »

If you want speed like you've never seen along with power consumption figures that will barely touch the battery, then move over to SSD (Solid State Disk).

+1 however be very wary what models you buy because there is a MASSIVE difference in performance of SSD from far slower than IDE to maxing out the SATA 2 controller.

KillerWatt

Hammyman wrote: »

+1 however be very wary what models you buy because there is a MASSIVE difference in performance of SSD from far slower than IDE to maxing out the SATA 2 controller.

Absolutely.

I did a fair bit of research before making the move over, the general consensus is the Intel X25-M range of drives provide the biggest "bang for buck".

Just done a quick test on mine, sustained read rate is 180 MB/sec with a peak read rate of 242 MB/sec....that'll explain why Win 7 is fully loaded from start in 8 seconds

TheEffect

KillerWatt wrote: »

All depends on whether the new drive draws more power than the stock one.
If you want speed like you've never seen along with power consumption figures that will barely touch the battery, then move over to SSD (Solid State Disk).

I don't have SSD money, being a student...

scottishblondie

TheEffect wrote: »

I've just purchased a 7200rpm 500GB to replace the stock 5400rpm 250GB. Is the bump in speed going to hit the battery much?

I installed a 7200rpm in my Macbook about 2 years ago. I didn't notice any real change in battery life, but there is an audible hum when I place it on a hard surface!

KillerWatt

TheEffect wrote: »

I don't have SSD money, being a student...

Not as expensive as you think when you do the homework

There is one distinct downside however.....once you get used to the speeds of SSD, anything less (including WD Velociraptor drives in RAID 0) appears to be nothing less than prehistoric by comparison.

The performance gains of SSD aren't all in the drive though, even motherboards that have SATA 6 interfaces can be quite easily saturated by some of the drives out there and will end castrating the performance because the interface simply can't keep up.

spikedouglas

Depends on disc usage, but I wouldn't expect much difference. (I'm a Mac tech support guy sometimes).