Macbook Pro hard drive speed
 

Hey all,

I just purchased a 2.6g Macbook Pro, which is beautiful, by the way. I ordered it with the 200gig 7200rpm drive, but it arrived with the 300gig 4200 drive. Before I call them up and freak out, what are your thoughts on the slower drive?

I would most likely be editing with footage on an external drive anyway, but can imagine capturing to the laptop, or transferring footage from the laptop to external drives here and there. Should I definitely have the drive replaced? Or will it not really make a difference considering I will usually use external drives?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Personally I would call them up and tell them to fix it. (whoever it is you bought from).

5400rpm is kinda a ´standard´on hard-drives. 7200rpm is great. I wouldnt personally want any mac or PC with less than 5400rpm.

Yeah I'd send it back- you want the faster drive in this case. Playback esp of HD material is going to be iffier on the drive you got. Plus typically you put your renders, waveform and thumbnail cache on the system drive, so that could bog down too.

Noah

I guess I would call them back too, especially because you probably paid extra for the 7200 drive. However, It's not entirely that critical for two reasons. One, the denser packing of data on the 300gb drive, even though it spins slower, nets a decent data rate on sustained reads of large files (you'll reap the speed benefit of the 7200 drive on small, rapid data reads). Two, you really shouldn't be using the internal drive for editing or storing video footage anyway, which you know.

It's more a case of principal than performance. I think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to eek out a huge noticeable difference between the two drives. IMHO.

Where did that drive come from
 

I just ordered a MBP and the info I had showed a std drive that is either a 200 or 250 GB 5400rpm with a 200GB 7200rpm option for the 15inch
The 17 inch one shows a 250GB 5400rpm with a 7200 rpm 200GB option. If you got something other than that I would be asking questions. They must be getting rid of some old stock if they stuck that into your machine.

Yeah, I called them today and they said they sent the wrong machine. Had the wrong amount of ram, too. Return shipping is paid for and I'm having it replaced.

Thanks for all the replies.

Actually, when you go to the Apple Store Canada, the 300G 4200rpm drive is an option for the 17" Macbook Pro.