Mac hard drive upgrade: faster and uses less power

While I'm still waiting for my MacBook Pro to return from the repair shop, my friend Ben is rolling up his sleeves and upgrading the hard drive in his notebook. He just removed the 120 GB 5400RPM drive and replaced it with a $200 Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drive sporting 160 GB of capacity. Thinking that he'd get increased drive performance at the cost of less battery life, Ben ran some benchmarks with XBench and whaddya know: he's seeing less power usage on the new drive, along with the faster seek and transfer speeds! For all of the steps, details and benchmarks, hop on over to his personal site while I wait and see if my Mac arrives back home today.

Comments

[walt french]

The higher-capacity drives ought to be faster even at the same rotational speed because more data passes under the heads each millisecond.

Moving from say, a 120 GB drive up to a 240GB drive ought to give 2X the data rate if the extra capacity was achieved by extra platter(s) in the drive, or 40% higher rate if it was a simple density increase, such as from the perpendicular technology now showing up.

Obviously, going up to 7200 from 4200 is also a big -- approx 70% -- gain, but there are other advances at play, too.