Okay, perhaps I am the only one excited about this but hear me out. When I purchased my new MacBook Pro (I can't stop saying that) I went top of the line as a no brainer. I upgraded the CPU, maxed out the RAM, graphics... the last component I got stuck on though; the hard drive.
The problem with hard drives is that they can so seriously effect your machine when you are using a notebook, and each has positives and negatives. You can currently get up to a 320GB capacity in the 2.5" realm, which is nice and big. The downside is that it only rotates at 5400rpm which as
BareFeats found in their testing will significantly slow your machines overall performance.
Then you have 7200rpm drives. Faster is better after all right? Well there are two downsides. Firstly you get slightly less battery life from your machine with faster drives, however since the MBP battery life is neither outstanding nor poor, it's not going to be all that noticeable in my experience. The bigger deal is the capacity since I can currently only find up to 200GB capacities with 7200rpm drives. That's a major loss for me since my life is turning Digital Zen (yes, that really is me with a laptop and nothing much else to take with me when I move).
I went for the capacity since I still only have around 122GB free following a major clear out and moving all my work material to the work server. I still feel the HD is the one area of improvement the performance of this machine can be improved in however.
Well my friends, salvation is here! Western Digital (my favourite HD manufacturers bar none) are now making
320GB, 7200rpm, 2.5" SATA hard drives! Featuring a 3GB/s SATA bus and a 16MB cache, these drives are in all other ways almost identical to mine, except they rotate at 7200rpm. Seek times, transfer rates, formatted capacities, acoustics, temperatures, vibration, even power requirements and deceptions are almost identical! In theory, there is no down side.
I am really excited about this new drive and speeding up my MacBook Pro even more, without any kind of loss. I'll be picking one of these up as soon as they are available here in the UK around the end of the month.
Anyone else excited?
