New Internal H/D Question

In my personal experience the 7200 RPM drives were louder and caused vibration on the palmrest. This seems to be experienced by some people and not others. I tried a Hitachi and a Western Digital. The higher RPM speed does give you boost in performance, but for me it wasn't worth the vibration. I use my mac on my lap all the time, so I could clearly feel it. I now use a Western Digital 5400 (scorpio blue) and it is fast enough for what I do. I'll wait until the SSD drives become more affordable.

Most commonly, there's a choice between 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm HDDs. At first, the faster access 7200 rpm drives had problems with vibration, excess heat, and battery draining but the current offerings don't seem to exhibit these problems.

Personally, I've owned two Western Digital 7200 rpm drives: a 120GB and a 320GB. Both were installed into a first gen (core duo) MacBook and they performed very well. The 320 has been moved into this Aluminum MacBook.

The faster access speed comes into play most frequently at startup and application launching. -GDF

nick11570 wrote:
Follow up question: Should I buy a H/D with SATA 3.0 Gb/s or 1.5 Gb/s? Seems like there is a "jumper" that may need to be manipulated using one or the other. What would work best with my macbook?

No jumper is needed with most drives these days. They should be able to auto select. I understand that some of the older drives were designed with jumpers to force 1.5 Gbit/sec mode, but I haven't heard of many recently.

It doesn't matter. The only MacBook so far with the 3.0 Gb/s connection is the Mid-2009 model. All the previous ones are 1.5 Gb/s, and you can certainly use the hard drive that supports the 3.0 Gb/s connection with these computers.

~Lyssa