MB HD Upgrade: 5400 or 7200?

Rollo Tamasi

Evenin' chaps.

My Macbook came with a paultry 60GB Hard Drive. It wasn't long before I filled this up with encyclopedic documents and poetry...

I have had a roam around Komplett and I'm looking at two types of hard drive, 5,400 and 7,2000. I believe the MB's come with 4,200 by default. If I go for a 250 or 160 GB HD which has a spin of 7,200 will that east up my battery a lot more so than a 250 or 160 GB 5,200 HD?

Also, which of the HD's on Komplett would you recommend?

Also (again), if you're looking for a good guide on upgrading you ol' banger then this tutorial looks appetising.

babypink

i'd go seagate or samsung

as for speed, the faster drive will give you slightly faster access times and better read/write speeds at the expense of battery life. How much life you'll loose - i don't know!

5400 might be a good compromise, but if you don't find the speeds of your standard drive too bad - why not stick to 4200?!!

WUSBDesign

There are reports that the new 7200RPM drives consume same or less power as the 5400RPM ones. Yet, other reports differ in opinion.

TBH, for the same price, you might be better off getting a larger 5400RPM drive than a 7200RPM one as the latter's speed enhancement is not significantly higher - same conclusion we came to when upgrading a MacMini. Look out for the ones with 16MB cache (if any).

EDIT: one more thing - I think the MB supports SATA-150, and HDDs with SATA-300 interface falls back to SATA-150, but I could be wrong. The thing is SATA-300 HDDs consume more power with no additional throughput.

Chardee MacDennis

stay away from the Hitachi travelstar, the samsung spinpoint has been fine for me so far! i also wouldnt really bother paying much more for a 7200, go for capacity - unless you're working with video and even then i am not 100% sure you need it.

dmohalloran

I just upgraded my Macbook HD. Like the OP I had a 60GB. Went to Komplett and went for a 160B Hitachi Travelstar 5400rpm. Have it about a week, no complaints so far. but I am living in constant dread of HD failure. they are quite bad some reports say.
Has anyone had first hand experience of the reported random HD failure for these drives?

Chardee MacDennis

i do, failed one night for no apparent reason afetr about 3-4 months of use.

dmohalloran

I'm kicking myself, because I did lots of research, seen the bad write ups and customer reports on Newegg.com and sites like that about the Hitachi Travelstar drives, and then in a moment of madness, I ordered it a few days later, only to realise it was too late to cancel. I'm ultra observant of regular backups as a result.
I'm hoping I got a good one, if not it will be Seagate all the way.

WUSBDesign

Even the Seagate ones can be troublesome. Apple shipped some early MBs with Seagate drives, and it became widely known that a specific model and version of it crashes...with loss of data.