5400 or 7200 RPM HDD in a new MBP?

Get the 5400 rpm HDD with your MBP. Then order a 7200 rpm HDD from a place like Newegg or Amazon and replace it. This will cost you about $75, and that will leave you with a 'free' 5400 rpm backup HDD and some spare cash (based on the cost differences).

Do not worry about the heat. Both of my MBPs have 7200 rpm HDDs and there is no discernable difference and the impact on battery life is minimal.

I do not know of any tutorial.

Ciao.

Don't buy any other drive from Apple other then what it comes with as standard. Apple simply want way to much money to upgrade the drive and then they, Apple, Keeps the original drive that would normally come installed.

Buy the system with the standard drive then you can change it out yourself for much less money and keep the original and use it as a backup drive by using either a USB enclosure or SATA to USB Adapter.

Best Bang for the buck is the Seagate XT series drives. 7200RPM speed along with a built in Flash Memory storage sections that makes it almost as fast as a Solid State Drive (SSD) for a lot less then a SSD and not much more than a standard 7200RPM drive.

Your data transfer rates will be a function of the connection rather than the HDD speed. Use thunderbolt for the fastest speeds if you are willing to spend the money on those peripherals. Otherwise USB 3 will be the better option.

Ciao.

You may copy (clone) information from the internal HDD to an external one using Disk Utility>Restore. After that is complete you will have an external boot drive that you then physically swap with the one inside the MBP. The cost will be be the price of the enclosure which you really need any way. A good one is about $20, a cheap one is about $5.

Ciao.

The HDD with the faster rotational speed will perform faster in data retrieval in the MBP. The response time will be decreased with a 7200 rpm HDD vs a 5400 rpm drive. This will be most noticeable in 'heavy duty' applications. It is one of a number of factors in the performance equation though it is the the most 'important'.

You might find this website informative in that regard:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2012-mobile-hdd-charts/benchmarks,136.html

Ciao.

i'm not quite sure where people get the information of upgrading the RAM and Hard Drive in your Macbook Pro will void the warranty. All it says " it will void your warranty if you damage something while doing the upgrade". Then again, maybe Apple changed it's policy for the 2012 Macbook Pro.

I own a couple of Macbooks (2009 and 2010) and a couple of Macbook Pro (2010 and 2011).

Each of them has the following in their user guide (see image) I could be wrong for the 2012 Macbook Pro since they didn't come with any user guide.

If you were to place two MBPs side by side, the one with the 7200 rpm HDD will be noticeably faster than the one with the 5400 rpm HDD. This would be apparent in the boot, shut off and certainly in applications requiring a lot of RAM swaps. Understand that this will not be linear in relation to the respective speeds. Off hand I cannot quantify the speed/time differences.

As far as the warranty issue is concerned, Apple will not warranty any third party HDDs or RAM that has been installed in the MBP. The third party vendors warranty would apply to those items.

Ciao.

I have replaced all my stock hard drive in my Macbook Pro and Macbook Uni to SSD. Aside from that, I have upgraded all the RAM of my Macbook to 8GB and the RAM of my Macbook Pro to 16GB of RAM. My Macbook Pro had an issue and took it to Apple for warranty repairs - not once did they comment on the SSD and RAM installed in my Macbook Pro and did the necessary repairs.

In any event - you can replace the hard drive yourself - it's a 5 minute job to do the hard drive swap but a 20 minute to a couple of hours job to do the clone - depending on how much data is being cloned.

If you need a step by step on how to do the install - i can take a screen shot of my user guide and post it here for you.

good luck