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During real, everyday use, that is? I'm looking to upgrade a drive in a MacBook Pro, and am looking at either a 750GB/7200RPM or a 1TH/5400RPM drive. Would I care about the speed difference? Is it worth giving up the additional space on the larger drive?

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  • I would rather choose the 1TB 5400rpm one (provided they have the same price), because for me, capacity matters more. And the speed difference is often not noticeable. But when you work with larger files (= more long sequential reads), a HDD with 7200rpm could save you some time. Or a solid state drive, but that's much more expensive.
    – neverMind9
    Oct 29, 2018 at 10:24

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Yes, you would feel the difference. Applications will start faster, and the OS will boot faster as well.

Whether you care, is something you have to ask yourself.

How long will you take to come even close to filling up 750GB?

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    It's also worth noting that along with the performance increases, there will (likely) be an increase in noise, vibrations, and power consumption.
    – th3dude
    Dec 29, 2010 at 20:55
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    Good point on the space. I use a Macbook with 250 GB and I still have room.
    – Zan Lynx
    Dec 29, 2010 at 21:03
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    For many uses boot and program load time is a small fraction of the time they spend using the machine. It helps to know if much of your time is spent IO bound or not. Best case a faster drive is much better (I built a machine once when I new my killer app was IO bound; poured money into a fast drive and loved the result.). Worst case, you barely notice. Still, good answer.
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Dec 29, 2010 at 23:02
  • I have used Scorpio Black drives when upgrading my laptops and there is definitely a increase in performance and in 3 of 4 that I upgraded a reduction in noise. Cache size and general drive build quality are big factors. In general the lower cost consumer targeted laptops use the base quality drives. SSDs are definitely better if performance is sole concern.
    – jtreser
    Dec 30, 2010 at 13:22
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    [...much time passes...] For what it's worth, I did the 7200rpm upgrade, and was very happy with it. I believe the performance difference was indeed noticeable. Thanks to all for the advice.
    – Jim Miller
    Mar 1, 2012 at 22:01
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You will notice the difference. Yet though there are much more features in a disk to care about. (cache, single plate or not, access, seek times, etc) The rpm is only one more factor.

About the noise, power consuming, etc, you can check in storage section of silentpcreview.com. Of course check more details on tomshardware.com , anandtech, etc (those often speak about power usage and noise). Consider the noise in a laptop can be a bit more evident, but often depends on how it's all built. I have seen laptops with 7200rpm disk, not real noise, in my personal perception.

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If you really care about speed and aren't tight on money, then get an SSD.

Look for the models that are advertised for use in Macbooks, because they need to fit the space in the laptop and the drive firmware needs to do garbage collection and not rely on TRIM.

The price is something like $200 for 250 GB though.

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