WD Scorpio Black into MBP

Hey guys, got a brand new MacBook Pro 2010. It came with a 320GB hard drive, but I have a WD Scorpio Black WD5000BEKT that I can swap in. My concerns are: heat, battery life, noise/vibrations, has anyone put a Scorpio Black in a new MBP?

 

just a heads up, I just installed the new drive and the computer is MUCH faster!
there is a slight "whirring" sound, and a tiny bit of vibrations, but the speed increase is well worth it!

 

Thanks for posting your impressions.

I also use a WD5000BEKT in my notebook. It is not the quietest 7200RPM drive out there but it is the fastest purely mechanical notebook drive available. I have no complaints about its performance.
Modern 7200RPM drives don't give off noticeably more heat or drain any more power than comparable 5400RPM drives.

Best wishes with the drive. The WD5000BEKT carries a five-year warranty, which is best-in-class.

 

yup it's a great drive! I'm going to test out battery life in the next few days, hopefully you're right and it doesn't drain anymore than the old drive.

 

I also have a black 500gb in my MBP 15. I find it noticebly quieter and has less vibrations than the seagate 7200 500gb in my mbp 13.

Still noisier than the stock drives which is to be expected

 

i'd be looking forward to your findings as regards to battery life....

 

Macbook/MBP mostly ship out with a Toshiba/Hitachi drive. A while back it was Seagate drives

 

Hitachi is what came out've my i5 MBP

 

yeah my stock drive was a hitachi in both the mbp 13 and 15.

I upgraded them both. My point was they are obviously quieter being 5400rpm but also quite a bit slower.

 

have you noticed more heat with the 7200RPM? I notice mine is warmer, which concerns me because the battery is right beside the hard drive.

 

Hey Charles do you have a benchmark for your WD5000BEKT?

I just got one few days ago and it seems to peak at 100mb/s in crystal disk mark, and when I split it into another partition, the speed changed to about 70-80mb/s on that new partition (probably due to different positions on the disk?)

 

Here's my CDM benchmark [attached] (500MB and 1000MB, latest version of CDM, x64).

This is from the C:\ partition which is right at the front of the drive. Right now this is the active partition, so the CDM benchmark is a few megs lower than if the drive was just running standalone.

You are correct -- the second partition will always have slower performance because it is towards the inside of the drive platters. The platters are moving the fastest at the outer edges so that is where disk throughput is the highest and access time is the fastest. Hard drives always write data from the outside of the platter towards the center for that reason. Your results sound normal to me.

 

Thanks for the benchmarks. I was thinking of just combining the two drives. But then I have one 120gb partition for OS and the remaining 340GB-ish for Steam. the Steam is the slower partition but I have a lot of games so it's going to be going into that slower part of the drive anyways.

I have the second partition separate because I want to defrag the system drive often to keep performance up, but I won't really defrag the Steam drive that much so defragging only 60gb of data is faster and I will most likely not get lazy and actually do it

 

GP,

Could you report back on the battery life results ? how much difference is there ?

Thanks

 

These are my results: I ran x-bench, and the drive is fast around 96mb transfer rate, my oem hitachi was around 40mb. However I noticed the computer is more warm, which worries me because the battery is right beside the hard drive, and batteries should be kept cool. Battery life in my case wasn't changed to much, I noticed it stayed about the same, maybe lost 30mins. Using google chrome kills my battery more, because it switches to the nvidia graphics card, instead of the intel. So this is my advice: the drive is very fast, but it does make the comp run hot, and there are some vibrations/noise (whirring sound).

 

thanks

you said battery life wasn't changed much and then you noticed it stayed same and then you said maybe lost 30 mins.....

anyways what was the battery life before the upgrade ? If you saying losing 30 mins was not much then your original battery life must have been awesome so to lose 30 mins wasn't much for you.....

1. So what was you original battery life ?

2. How much after upgrade ?

Thanks

 

original battery life has been good, I'd say 7 hours. What I meant was the battery life isn't a huge concern... to me the biggest concern in the vibrations. So what it comes down to is performance v.s. vibrations, because the speed increase is huge, literally double in performance, but there are some vibrations, and the whirring sound.

 

yes buddy i understand that battery life is not of huge concern to you but it is to me and hence i asked for same....

so could you tell me more approximately what was the before and after times...?

Thanks

 

7 hours before, 6:30 after.
But that depends on usage, I get those 7 hours with the computer mostly idle with the screen off downloading a torrent. If your running video it will be different, if your browsing the web and the drive is idle it'll be better. It all depends on usage, but if your just browsing the web, or doing stuff that doesn't access the drive constantly, it'll spin down and battery life should be similar to the original drive.