How do you think a 5,200 rpm 1TB laptop drive would fare?

[Tarekith]

Normally I like Seagate drive myself, but the WD's in my MBP and my wife's MBP seem fine.

[keiyam]

I would suggest Seagate! It's the brand that's being used in server machines and hard working workstations. So it's guaranteed that it will function in all occasions!

About the 5400/7200 now, it's not a huge difference. I think that you should mention the overall performance of the machine and not only the hard drive's. That means that if you have 1Gb of RAM and your Programs are thirsty for RAM, it really won't matter if you upgrade the hard disk.

Cheers

[glitchrock-buddha]

Current 5,400's are not in question. I don't know why people keep talking about them. I've got one. Runs fine.

It's the 5,200 1TB that I wonder about. Triple platter, 12.5"... not sure how it would be for battery, heat and performance.

[Tarekith]

Can't imagine it would be all that much different from the 5400, though probably not too hard to google some benchmarks of I/O and sustained transfer speeds. At least then you can compare with the 5400 speeds.

[glitchrock-buddha]

Can't imagine it would be all that much different from the 5400, though probably not too hard to google some benchmarks of I/O and sustained transfer speeds. At least then you can compare with the 5400 speeds.

Actually I haven't found any benchmarks but it's interesting to note that some people think that it will be worse performance by nature of being so big. I didn't realize larger size equated to worse performance. The other thing I wasn't sure about was how a 12.5" would fit in a macbook pro, which usually uses a 9.5", but from what I can see from reports online, the 12.5's fit fine.