MBP Hard Disk Upgrade

shiver · 15 Jan 2010 at 20:05

I'm looking to upgrade my MacBook Pro's hard disk.

I'd love to be able to fork out for a large, high performance SSD but they're just too expensive at the moment in my opinion.

So instead I just want to expand the capacity. 640GBs are about now so was going to go for one of them however, I was wondering what impact a 7200rpm drive would have on my MBP's battery life? Or whether there is a significant performance increase over a 5400rpm drive?

Looking to spend up to £100

Cybertronic · 16 Jan 2010 at 13:00

My Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB HD did not have any affect on my MacBook Pro's battery life and the performance difference is quite noticeable over the standard 5200RPM HD. A worthy upgrade!

Feek · 16 Jan 2010 at 13:04

There will be no noticeable difference whatsoever to the battery life.

ToshComputers · 16 Jan 2010 at 20:34

I have no experience with 640Gb drives, but have seen hundreds of 500Gig/5400 and 500/7200 in operation in Macbook Pro and Macbook units. Absolutely no problems with performance, although some users report the machine is a little warmer than before the upgrade (and Macbook Pros tend to run a little warm anyways), which is reasonable given that the 2.5" SATA drives do not have a built-in fan on their own. There are some reports that battery life is shorter per charge, but that likely depends on what applications you use and whether the drive spins constantly or not.

shiver · 17 Jan 2010 at 11:46

Cheers guys.

I checked out the power consumption on some drive manufacture websites and it seems there is minimal difference between 5400 and 7200.

So I think I'll forgo the extra 140GB and get a faster 7200RPM 500GB drive.

MacRS4 · 17 Jan 2010 at 14:06

I've ended up with the 640Gb in mine, alongside a Crucial M225 SSD. I still get around 4 hours on a late 2008 model MBP. That's not too shabby.

Westyfield2 · 17 Jan 2010 at 14:55

I've got the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB 7200RPM in mine. No noticeable decrease in battery life. It's soo much faster than the stock 160GB 5400RPM was, kinda like when I switched from 7200RPM to 10,000RPM in my PCs. Only slight criticism is it's a bit noisier, but the only thing to fix that would be SSD.