hey guys just wondering if anyone has ever upgraded there internal hard drive from 5400rpm to 7200rpm.
i curently have a 5400rpm 120gb hard drive, and im thinking about upgrading to a 320 or 500gb hard drive.
i guess what i want to know is will the 72rpm help with loading tracks and searching out songs faster than the 5400 rpm. or should i just save the money and stick with 54rpm. ive experienced lag from time to time.
also, has anyone ever had a negative experienced using an external hard drive while at a gig.
I have a stock macbook pro 13’ i picked up in October of 2010, i’ve never had a problem with tracks at all.
As for external hard drives, the only reason i’d ever bring it to a gig was incase my laptop failed.
I would suggest just bringing the external hard drive as a back up incase your laptop fails. I would just carry my main playlist / songs I plan on playing on my MacBook Pro, everything else on the external hard drive, and even then i’d transfer / copy the songs I want onto my mac and then play from there.
Yeah, I’ve upgraded my HDD from a 160GB 5400rpm disk to a 500GB 7200rpm one. Just be sure that the height of the new HDD isn’t bigger than 9.8 mm (= 0.39 inch), or else it won’t fit.
I went from 160 5200 to a 500 7200 and haven’t noticed anything really. If you’re going to do it upgrade to an ssd, you’ll definitely notice that. Although a 160gb is like $700+, plus you’ll probably have to cop an external drive on top..
Echo that.
That drive is my next purchase in a week or so.
I have replaced around 6 HDs in various Macs. I have always used WD Scorpios and have never had an issue.
Also, on the 5400/7200 (endless debate) of course a 7200 is faster and loads quicker (to a degree) but if your usage scenario is primarily Traktor you will not notice a difference.
7200 is nice to have but dont be a slave to it, thats all im saying.
Cue big rant from someone but the fact is the difference is so negligible that its not worth too much worry or damage to your pocket. especially at 300 & 500gig sizes.
I upgraded to a WD 500gb 5400rpm the day after I bought mine (original was 160). I was told not to put 7200rpm ones in 13" macs to prevent overheat. Whether that last statement is true or not, HD works like a charm and searching/loading is lightning fast.
also 7200 rpm burns more battery than 5400 rpm, a friend just upgraded to 7200 rpm and noticed a massive decrease in battery life
im thinking of installing SSD on my macbook pro and using optibay to replace my dvd drive with a sata hard drive, since SSDs are expensive, this combo allows a small SSD on main bay (120gb, not too expensive, for installation and OS) and the optibay can have a Sata 500 GB hard drive for the music, I’ve seen people do this and it boosts the overall speed significantly due to the OS being installed on the SSD
If you can live without your optical drive (or use an external), using a SSD conversion kit is an awesome way to go. I have had good luck with the products from other world computing.
I am by no means affiliated with that company, but I do have personal experience with that drive and I was blown away with the performance. Be careful with SSD drives that you don’t cheap out as some drives will experience a decline in performance over time due to writing/re-writing. The nicer drives seem to have a mechanism to avoid the decrease in performance.
I recommend installing your OS and applications on a SSD drive and your songs and other files on a 7200 RPM internal HD. I have had 7200 RPM drives in my current 15" MPB (unibody) and my previous generation 15" MBP without any overheating problems.
As far as the bays go, I know you can find some really cheap solutions instead of the expensive one listed on the OWC website.
I can’t wait for the price to decrease and the capacity to increase on these SSD drives.
My DJ partner just upgraded from last friday from 120gb 5400 to 500gb 7200. It’s much faster, especially when we’re producing. We used to have to bring an external hard drive for the music as the old 120gb HD was already completely filled.
3 negative experiences that I’ve experienced with him, and an additional 2 more that he’s experienced. 2 of which were during a gig, another 2 right before a gig. I think about 3 of the 5 resulted in the loss of the entire external (500gb almost completely filled.)
I would definitely get the upgrade. It’s not worth losing mountains of GBs over, and then having to retrieve that much 3 times over.
I just bought the 500gb Momentus XT 7200rpm from OWC -
Comes with everything you need to backup and upgrade your internal drive. Haven’t recevied it yet so can’t comment on it’s performance but the Seagate website claims it to be within seconds of the performance of an SSD -
Looking forward to upgrading my measly 120gb internal so I can fit my tunes on there. I’m currently using a Laice external for the bulk of my music and although it has never failed on me I have always been concerned about it.
I want to move away from having an external… if your internal fails then you’re pretty much screwed anyway even if you have an external drive with music on. Unless that is, if your booth has some CDJ2000’s or similar with a USB in? No CDJ2000’s where I play so if my laptop fails then I always have a CD wallet with me just in case. I’ve been using Torq since V1 and it’s only ever crashed twice during a gig where I’ve needed the CDs but glad I had them…
Very true… I hadn’t actually thought of my external being a bootable image as I was using it for mp3 storage only. Probably a good idea I guess, however if it was more than a HD failure a bootable image still wont save you so always a good idea to have a plan B. I make a habit of leaving a CDJ cued up during my set just in case…
I might re-image my external as bootable after I install the new drive… Thanks for the tip.
My drive arrived Friday but I held off on replacing it in my macbook until Sunday as a precaution. I had a gig Saturday night and had read that a few people replacing their own drives had torn their ribbon cables and didn’t want that happening without enough time to buy a replacement.
Everything went well and I am definitely noticing speed improvements in opening apps and reading my music directories that were already on my previous internal. Haven’t transferred over all my external music yet but looking forward to not requiring my external drive at my gig this weekend.
I can recommend the OWC kit that I posted earlier, it came with all the tools required for the swap, the external USB 3 case included was awesome, helped me clone my internal (using SuperDuper! on Mac… not included in the kit) with ease and now I have a new external, albeit only a 120gb 5400 drive, that I can use as a backup.
I’d never replaced a laptop drive before so I followed this guide -