I'm planning on buying a new Macbook Pro, and originally was going to get the 7200rpm 500gb option. I'd heard a while ago it will make computer games go faster (is this true…?). I've ALSO read that there are some issues with the 7200rpm 500gb drives and "clicking" as well as overheating and draining battery life faster as compared to the 5400rpm. Are any of these claims true? Does anyone know if running windows with bootcamp sees any of the above problems with the 7200rpm option in addition to osx?
Edit: At this point, I'm mostly interested in:
- How much does battery life change with the 7200rpm hard drive vs the 5400rpm hard drive?
Best Answer
I got the 7200RPM fitted into my MBP (it's about 2-3 months old). I use VM Fusion all day long and wanted the best VM performance I could get. My MBP is on all day, 6 days a week, and it's always busy - and I've never had the drive overheat, on battery or mains. There will always be a few bad drives in any batch, but I would say that if you run large, disk intensive applications (virtual machines, photoshops, movie and photo editing) then you should consider the faster drive.
I can't see how a faster drive is going to have a huge impact on games - the graphics card, available memory, processor speed and optical disk speed will all have a bigger impact than the hard drive speed, I would have thought.