Just got my new harddrive for my macbook (160gb's)

I just got the Hitachi 5k160 Sata 160gb 5400 rpm harddrive,

here is a pic of how ridiculously small it is


sorry for the poor quality of the pic, but it is about half as thin as my motorola razor.

Pros: it runs faster, and cooler then any apple macbook 5400 rpm harddrive.
it is the highest capacity drive you can get for a notebook at the moment, seagate has a 160 sata too, but it isn't as good.
did i mention it is cheaper than the 120gb drive you can customize your mac with through apple

 

Where did you get that and how much was it?
Most of the 160gig 7200rpm drives I see are still pretty **** pricey.

And it runs cooler?

 

I don't think there are any 160gig 7200rpm 2.5in drives on the market.

 

whoops... sorry, misread. thought you said 160 gig 7200 rpm

well, how much was that drive then? I'm not sure if I'd rather get the 120 gig 7200 or the 160 gig 5400.

 

Cool, I haven't been sure if I wanted to get the Hitachi or Seagate 160 gig drives. Just to ask, what makes it better than the comparable Seagate drive?

 

MacSales.com at least sells it for $249: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/

 

I got it for 210$, after shipping+tax. From youruplink.com - they have recently raised their prices, and I wouldn't suggest buying from them. zipzoomfly.com is probably your best bet for this item.

Anyway- so I thought I wanted a 7200 rpm drive too, I do work with long audio wave clips, of 20 minutes to an hour. And drafting. Well I found out that the 7200 drive is only marginally faster only if you are moving 500mb+ files, so maybe if you do video work, 7200 is for you. But for me, where I do audio, mechanical drafting, and gaming- 160gb 5400 is sweet. There was an article somewhere with benchmarks, but I can't find it for the life of me.

The 5400's run quieter, cooler and suck less energy then the 7200's

I think for a short while they were 180$ on zipzoomfly, you gotta make sure you get the sata and not the ata, the ata won't fit/incompatible.


Oh- and one last thing, on my machine with 2gbs of ram- I never feel the harddrive really being a chokepoint, I don't know if that would be amplified if you were running with less ram,- the deal is the random reads and writes that 5400s and 7200s are the same speed. So under normal usage, you can't tell the difference.

 

When I bought my old Sager latop, the 7200 drive actually used less power than the 5400 (vs. same size). There were several benchmarks at the time comparing them (tomshardware and anandtech among them). Not sure how the newer drives compare though (due to physical differences between the older and newer generations).
And I'm not sure on this... but now I wonder if the 7200's just had more cache.

 

I'm sorry, I can't find the benchmarks for the 5k160 and some 7200 drives, I will look some more later.

 

If 160gb was the advertised hd space, how much was the actual?

I would say 147gb minus 17gb after installing Tiger and its components...comes to about 130gb?

 

You won't really find many for 160GB its still fairly new to the 2.5in HDD market, it used to be 120GB that was the largest, now its 160GB.

You also always take 75% of a HDD, after you start using more than that much HDD space, your HDD will start slowing down.

 

From the boot disk, system profiler, and when I partitioned it, it saw a whopping

149.05 GBs

 

Nice HDD, =) I got a 60 GB and I have all my music, games, and programs installed and have 35 gb left I barely use any.

 

On my 60, I was running xp and osx.

The xp was a basic installation + World of Warcraft, Adobe Audition and Steam w/ Counterstrike Source. (I will not be reinstalling steam I don't think, since it runs poorly) (Wow on the other hand runs great.)

OS X, I had my entire index of music, my cd's and lp's that i've ripped, for a total of about 200 albums. I had iLife and iWork, Google Earth, and a few other itty bitty things.

Anyway, it was packed to the brim, I hadn't even installed Microsoft Office XP Pro yet. Now i've got room to do all my music work, draft, etc.

 

Here are some good articles on 5400rpm vs. 7200rpm. The results are not always as you'd expect...

http://www.barefeats.com/5472.html

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT061801032003