Hard Drive Choice

[macuser256]

Which is more advantageous, a 120 GB HD at 5400 rpms or would a 100 GB hd at 7200 rpms. How much of a difference in performance does the 7200 rpms make over the 5400rpms. This would be for a MBP. I mean I would like the extra 20 GBs but if there is a really big difference in speed of accessing information in the 7200 rpms I might consider getting that model. Does anyone have any suggestions with regard to this choice?

[chucker]

This thread is near-identical (http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?t=18623), so I recommend you read it for advice. :)

[kretara]

I have a 17" MBP and I got the 100GB 7200 RPM instead of the 120GB 5400 RPM drive. I valued the added speed since I do alot of reading/writing to disk (moving 1-2GB of data around per day at a minimum).
There is obviously a speed difference between the 2 disks, but it is not as noticable as you might think.

Unless you are needing to have very fast disk I/O, I would go with the 5400 RPM drive and the extra space. I only have 13GB left on my HD and I wish that I had a bigger HD. I'm now carrying around this little 40GB firewire HD to hold my music and so I could free up a little HD space on my MBP.

[scratt]

Go for the extra space... Definitely.

And in a year, or perhaps even before you'll probably want to crack it open and stick one of the larger drives coming available in there.. I know I do already!