Hi - I am going to buy an MBP. I really want the 13" form factor since I will be lugging it about every day to customer meetings etc. However, I also want the fastest machine I can get as I will be plugging it in to a 24" widescreen monitor at home and hope to use the laptop for Adobe Premiere elements and Lightroom at home. I was disappointed to see that I can not spec a 500gb 7200rpm hd like i can with the 15" model. Anyone know why? Cheers, Dub.
I know it's not a reason they don't offer the drive, but if you are after the fastest machine you can get have you considered an SSD? It's the first thing i'l be shoehorning into mine.
I think the hard drive is a user serviceable part, so you could get away with upgrading it your self....
It is. You don't void your warranty installing your own hardrive or Ram. They provide instructions how to do it in the manual.
Ahh ok - thanks for that. Re. SSD. I thought about it - but i'd just rather have copious amounts of space instead and would like the fastest drive possible with that in mind. I guess the thing to do is to buy the smallest disc option and then swap for a drive of my choice then. Thanks for that.
I just put a WD Scorpio Black in my base-spec 13" MBP (within an hour of getting it ). Thing flies now
I was thinking of the Seagate Momentus 500GB... I think from reading various posts that this is what is used in the 15" 7200rpm upgrade version. However, I then also read that there had been some issues from people who bought the 7200rpm drives from apple - something to do with clicking noises and drives spinning up and down or something? Apparently it is something to do with an incompatibility with the g-shock system that is in those drives...
Sorry to be a pedant but could you properly evaluate the speed within an hour? I can't say fresh out of the box my MBP felt slow at all, and with experience of numerous desktop hardrives all with incrementally better looking specifications than the last, I've never seen a massive difference unless using a Raptor or SSD. Do these Scorpio blacks have notably superior seek times?
It's not just seek times, large file shifting etc is greatly improved (so Time Machine backups/restores etc). The hard drive is still the biggest bottleneck in all but the slowest systems, so it makes sense to attack that first. The Scorpio Blacks are incredibly good drives.
This problem has been fixed in a recent firmware update which can be found in 'Software Update' if your Mac is eligible for the update.
Seems several people have gone for the WD Scorpio Black. Can I ask why you went for this rather than the Seagate Momentus which is what Apple themselves use for a 7200rpm drive?
At the time I was looking for a 320GB 7200RPM hard drive, the WD Scorpio Black mostly produced the best benchmark scores which also included the Seagate Momentus.
The 7200RPM drives are faster, but not massively so. The difference between the 7200 and a decent SSD are night and day: As to needing copious amounts of storage, I've gone for a bit of a hybrid. I have a 128Gb SSD for boot, apps and stuff I want performance on, and then a second 500Gb Seagate Momentus installed in where the DVD drive is: http://www.markc.me.uk/MarkC/Blog/Entries/2009/9/1_Second_Hard_Disk_into_a_Macbook_Pro_Unibody.html
