Ableton Forum

Holla!

Just got myself a 13'' MBP as I like the form factor a lot BUT discovered that the internal HD is 5400 rpm only ...

I'm thinking of upgrading it to 7200 rpm or possibly SSD drive as I would not like to take any chances on stage.

Let me hear your experiences concerning the HD streaming speed.

Cheers,
Px

5400 is acceptable within limits. triggering clips etc, unheavy effects processing and you'll be fine.
A faster HD is always advisable though.

it makes a lot less difference with SATA than IDE depending on your track/plugin load it could be advantageous to have a 5400 drive, less drain on battery and typically less noisy (although playing Live this is obviously no biggie). On mains power, I can run LOTS of tracks and plugins off a 5400 rpm drive.

I would wait for SSD drives to develop a bit, in a year or two they could well be the standard, have faster access times and much more capacity than at present.

There's no way of telling if it'll suffice for your sets except by trying.

But I'll tell you this.

When I got an MBP a couple of years ago, I was gonna swap its 5400 drive for a 7200 drive I bought less than a year earlier. It was the fastest 2.5" 7200 rpm drive on the market when I got it. I decided to benchmark both drives though and lo and behold, the 5400 drive was faster in every respect. And consumed less power. Seagate's web site confirmed this (they were both Seagate drives) and so did Tom's hardware page.

Hard drives may be old tech, but they still manage to make them faster, all the time.
So the latest 5400 drive may well be faster than a not very old 7200 model.

but as HDtech ie solid sttade get beter the new gen of 3rd party plug ins exploit it so a advantage only for a little while does it make it advantagous- sorry pissed

Cheers fellas, good infos here ...

I thinks i gonna ride it out with the 5.4k drive for now. I'm not playing huge track counts, full wavs thought, but I take it should be ok.

Thx!
Px.

i had a 5400rpm drive in my MBP for years and never encountered a problem... i did however upgraded my drive size lately and also moved to a 7200rpm drive and the only noticeable difference in my case is that the comp does start up a little faster, using audio apps i can't feel any difference at all.

but then i use in average only around 12-20 tracks and reasonable amounts of plugs, etc (i do a lot of bus processing) so i work pretty 'economical'