Macbook Pro: 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM

[Niels Neeskens]

I ordered the Macbook Pro and had to decide between 5400 RPM with 120 GB or 7200 RPM with 100 GB. I decided to go for the larger harddisk with 5400 RPM, but now I remember reading a topic somewhere that maybe this will bring problems for editing HD in Final Cut Studio. What is a better choice, larger harddisk or higher RPM?

Thanx
Niels

[gunleik]

Apparantly anyone that has an opinion on this say:
Do not have media files on your system drive after FCP 5.

I Haven't tried it, but it makes sort of sense. Buy a FW 800 drive if you're buying the 17" or a fw 400 drive for the 15" and you should be good to go.
This drive should be a 7200 with 16 mb of cache. You'll easily fit that into your budget if you compare the price of an external drive to the price of the bto drive upgrade.

Gunleik

[Niels Neeskens]

Thanx! Any advice for the external drive. I saw a Lacie Two Big. That's a raid system with two Sata 2 drives up to 1 tb. Anyone experience with that? So to be clear I got no problems with my high definition workflow if I work on my Macbook Pro with 5400 RPM instead of 7200. Because I ordered it and can maybe change the RPM. Thanks in advance.

Niels

[R Gale]

So to be clear I got no problems with my high definition workflow if I work on my Macbook Pro with 5400 RPM instead of 7200. Because I ordered it and can maybe change the RPM. Thanks in advance.

Niels
Make it 7200 RPM if you want the option of using the internal drive to play any video clips.
Faster is essential for editing video, and certainly for HD editing. I'd get the 7200.

[Niels Neeskens]

Ok R Gale, I just changed the order to 7200 RPM, now I have to wait a little bit longer till the order is here but if my workflow will go faster I will catch up eventually :) Thanks

Niels

[Boomerang]

Worth the wait.... because its a laptop you may be in the field and need to work of the internal drive.

[Niels Neeskens]

That's true, only a shame that the hard drive is a little bit smaller...

[Anarkic Twist]

a guy in the apple store (in london) said that the new 2.1ghz macbook pro hd's were 5400 speed but had bigger cache - so were very nearly equally as fast - anyone know about this?

[THoff]

I don't buy it -- the on-drive caches are miniscule when compared to the amount of data being moved in video editing. The most common cache sizes are 8 and 16MB, and the extra 8MB is just not that significant. On top of that, the operating system will do its own write caching.

[RDykmans]

I primarily have been using a Graid connected to FW800 via an expresscard adaptor but have acutally done some editing with DVCPro HD footage off the stock internal drive (in my case the 5400 rpm drive) and had no issues with playback. However it was limited as far as FX etc goes.

But as always with this stuff faster is usually better.

[Cees Mutsaers]

Go with the 7200 rpm, I will do it as well and I will buy an external HDD as well for archiving.