I’ve decided to purchase the 17” macbook pro laptop… I’ll be using this for CS2 & 3 as well as video editing. I intend to put all my data on an external 500GB Mercury Elite Pro 7200RPM FireWire 800 drive. The 17” macbook pro can be fit with a Seagate 100gb 7200rpm drive – the apple store online subtracts $100 for this configuration.
“The 7200rpm internal drive is NOT significantly faster than the stock 5400rpm when doing small RANDOM reads and writes. That implies that it won't give you much advantage for booting and normal operations.”
“However If you work on audio or video where large blocks are captured or played back, the 7200rpm internal drive of the MacBook has a clear advantage over the stock 5400rpm internal drive.”
Comments and benchmarks here:
MacBook Pro - 5400rpm
I understand that intial speeds with the 7200rpm seagate drive are fast, however things slow down rapidly as the drive fills. Test show that the stock 160gb 5400rpm drives ultimately surpasses the speed of the Seagate 7200rpm when it becomes full or nearly so.
My question regards the amount of space that Is used by the apple OS and all the programs I would probably require. If the space is fairly small and I don’t utilize the remainder of the drive than it should remain fast. I would be saving all my data files on the external hard drive.
Bear in mind that I am not tech savvy.
Should I go with the 100gb 7200rpm drive?
Thank you for your thoughts.
tws
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