Purchased Macbook Pro

Purchased the following Specs:

15" (Matte)
2.4 Ghz
256 Mb 8600
200 Gb *7200 RPM*

Any more importantly (Free after rebate)

Canon Printer
8 Gb Ipod Touch

Anyway... Was going to purchase a iMac cause well getting this rig for when StarCraft 2 is released hopefully early next year But my wife decided to get an iMac this fall.

Anyone know if upgrading the HDD that has finds a performance difference compared to the 5400? I won't find out till 2 weeks from now so curious in advance as my old MBP purchased in summer of 07 was a 5400 RPM drive.

 

Yes there will be a performance increase if you upgrade the HDD to 7200rpm.

You'll mainly feel it during load times of games, copying large files, and general load times of things.

 

If you upgrade the hard drive yourself, you'll be voiding the warranty. Getting an Apple tech to do it won't, but it'l cost you.

 

heh... I think you misunderstood what I said

 

Not trying to bump a pointless thread but this made no sense to me... I placed my order about 10 minutes before I posted this thread... Well I got an email about 6 hours later saying they've shipped the MBP... which is odd cause I ordered a out of spec HDD the 7200 RPM so figured it'd take a day or so longer.

BUT this is where it gets weird the iPod touch and printer haven't shipped the least customizable items which should be just pulled off rack. This is opposite of all my previous purchases.

Btw if your reading this I realize it's a pointless post but I thought it was ironic..

 

I had a 7200 before and it was way faster than my 5400 drive. Then it died, but that's another story
Anyway 7200 is way faster than 5400, especially when doing stuff with small files, like copy 60,000 files from here to there, back-ups, etc.
I always have iPulse running so I can see the speeds right in front of me at all times, the 7200 drive often had a worst case performance 5 MB/s with small files, the 5400 drops below 1MB/s.
For large file operations, the differences are pretty small, and the 5400 is plenty fast.
Another thing I noticed is that OS X is really excellent about caching. I have 4GB so that probably helps but if you use the same batch of files over and over again, let's say in a large compile, then the HD cache makes it so 5400 and 7200 drives are equal - because everything is in the RAM cache already and so is as fast as it can possibly get.

Compare with Windows XP there was a dramatic performance difference. The Windows XP cache seems seriously broken.

 

oh perfect thanks orthorium