On the Topic of Macbook Pro Hard Drives

K

kyle_doris

Well-known member
With the new Core 2 Duo MBP's coming out this previous week i'm going to be making a significant purchase on one. I would like to open this thread in hopes people who either own the MBP or have used them extensively can comment on how they feel the hard drives performs when editing. The options right now for the 17" bookpro are...

100 GB 7,200 rpm (100 dollars less)
160 GB 5,400 rpm
200 GB 4,200 rpm

if anyone would be so kind to give a few pros and cons about each one or simply an overview on their performance experiences that would be very helpful.

thanks!
 
A full install of FCP Studio will use about 60 GB. If you plan to dual boot into another OS consider the space requirement for that OS in your calculations.
 
It's not wise to edit from your system drive period, so it really doesn't matter what your main drive speed is; just whatever kind of space you'd need for all your music and such i would get the 160.. I would always edit from a secondary drive, either Firewire 400 or 800 or you can get the optibay... I have an 80 GB with FCP, parallels installed... Parallels only grows as the partition grows..
 
You'll get better performance, in my opinion, from a SATA raid from G-tech along with an expresscard adaptor for SATA from Seritek. That's what I use and it works very well.
Jim
 
I still did not hear the answer whether for instance the 160Gb 5400 rpm hdd is fast enough for edditing !!! How many timelines at once can be used at the same time on those 3 hdd options without have to wait ages for rendering time???
 
Drive speed has some relationship to the need to render, but that is based on how fast the computer is mostly, not the speed of the drives holding captured footage.

Speed there relates to DF, not rendering. A full rendered animation codec will stop drop frames if the drive isn't fast enough to transfer the data.
 
5400 is fine, but remember, that you dont want to use the same hard drive your OS System is installed on to edit.. as this could cause some unstabilities... It's best to edit from a secondary or external hard drive..
 
k, looks like i'll go with the 160 GB as a compromise and just invest in a bus powered G-RAID Mini...

thanks!
 
Bus-powered G-Raid Mini is a very nice drive. Personally, I would be partial to an external SATA solution rather than firewire. Of course, the SATA will not be bus powered. That is definitely a factor for editing on airplanes (as I sometimes do).

Ned Soltz
 
yea, i'll prolly look into a more permanent solution once i move but at the moment i spend long periods of time commuting from my job in NYC to my place out on long island and i would like to use some of those 3 hours a day to get various things done. the bus powered drive seems to be the best bet for now.
 
I was in the same boat this past summer. I opted for the faster internal laptop drive, 7200, albeit a bit smaller in size.

Since all my media is on a G-Drive (FW800), it's not much of an issue. Currently, I have around 30 Gigs free on my Mac HDD. It already has Final Cut Studio, Shake, Syntheyes, CinePaint, AbiWord and other misc programs. The only other major app to go onto the Macbook is my copy of LightWave, which is currently being ported to UB.

I haven't used the bus-powered drives yet. I've only edited DVCPro HD and DV off the G-Drive. No problems, though. This config has worked without problems since I started using it over the summer.
 
Go with the 100GB 7200 rpm, take the $100 savings and put it towards an external drive. As others have said, you want your media on the external drive and your OS and applications on your internal. 100GB is more than pleanty for that.
 
interesting, yes that does make sense in a way... one thing though is... from what i'm reading there isn't much performance difference between a 5,400 Perpendicular Recording Hard Drive and a 7,200 which doesn't use it, since the data is more dense...

i have to research the subject a little more, but 100 dollars would go far in getting a better G-RAID, so that might be more sensible.
 
Just bought a new 2.33 Ghz C2D Macbook Pro. I have a generic 120 Gig exterior hard drive AND a 250 Gig G-Drive. The generic ext drive from Transintl.com captures perfectly using Final Cut Express 1.0.1 but the G-Drive will not capture; it's icon shows up and you can save and transfer files however. Curiously it captured fine on my 17" Powerbook.

I initialized the G-drive but no go. Must be a band width thing and will probably work with a firewire Expresscard. The Transintle works fine though; just not as good looking. I may end up using the G-Drive only for storage purposes by saving files from the 120 Gig Transintl.
 
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