Macbook 5400rpm drive question

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Just a quick question for you chaps :)

The missus is using an Acer laptop at the moment with a 7200rpm hard drive in it and it does the business but she wants a Macbook soon and you can only get them with a 5400rpm hard drive. Can you upgrade the hard drive? Is there any major performance difference?

Thats all, cheers :)

Craig
 
Yes you can, and I don't know, but I should think so.

(Re: can you upgrade them? and is there a big difference?)

I've been thinking of doing it to mine.

Also though, most laptops only come with 5400rpm drives, they're not unbearably slow and a bint probably wouldn't notice anyway.
 
iirc the current drives in macbook/pro are perpendicular type anyways so the performance would be similar to an older 7200 drive.

Obviously there are the seagate perp 7200 drives which would be faster still :)
 
does a 7200rpm drive make that much difference to performance over the standard 5400rpm?
Got the money to upgrade but dont see the point if it makes no difference!

When you upgrade is it possible to copy everything to the new HDD or would it require a fresh install of OSX and all software?
 
mosfet said:
If they're both SATA then you can stick them in your desktop and do a drive clone with something like Norton Ghost.


there arent mini sata connectors for laptop hdd? I always presumed the 2.5" disks would have a different connector, but maybe not :D
 
Get a laptop SATA enclosure off the bay for £3. Then use SuperDuper! (its free for this sort of backup) to copy everything across. Then switch disks.

You now have a portable and bootable, backup. Always handy.
 
Wish the MBP was an easier upgrade on the HDD, 5400rpm makes me cry. Its such a bottleneck, my old opteron rig was considerably faster in windows/unrarrig/decoding binaries etc. because of a decent 7200rpm 16mb cache drive.

5400rpm ftl, if you can change without voiding warranty etc. then do it!
 
you can upgrade without voiding the warranty, on the apple site it even tells you how to upgrade the hard-drive step by step yourself
 
IMO the 7200rpm drive does make a difference over 5400rpm drives

If you have the chance, try checking out the different specs at your local Apple store
 
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