Need a new hard drive

[mad0214]

Unfortunately, my hard drive died last weekend, and I've tried using disk utility and flashing the pram and it still won't mount. Luckily, I have a backup on dvd from January so I'm looking into getting a new hard drive. Can I use a 7200rpm hard drive with my macbook and do you guys have any you would reccommend. I'd like to spend around $100-$130 because I also want to buy an external.

[MarvinSum]

Yup, the MacBook supports 7200RPM drives as long as it's Serial-ATA (SATA).

[Jack Cory]

sucks that apple doesn't use 7200rpm drives in the macbooks and macbook pros

[Kyle Nilson]

I've had great success with Seagate's 7200 RPM SATA drives in my MacBook, and other computers. Their 5 year warranty can't be topped either.

[Jaysen]

keep in mind that 7200 drives will require a bit more power. This is not a mac specific thing, but just a "necessary evil" of using a higer draw moter to spin the disks faster. Nothing big, and most of the time battery life won't be noticeably shorter.

on the "why use low speed drives" i actually prefer the idea of faster CPU and video cards as a trade off for drive speed. I can always swap a drive after market, but CPU and VPU, not so much.

BTW if you need to prove the lower TCO for a mac start with the hardware layer. I have yet to find a real windows systems that can compete price wise once you build the hardware up to mac specs.

[Kyle Nilson]

My MacBook, on 7200 RPM still gets 3 to 4 hours of battery life, depending on screen brightness and if I'm cranking Photoshop at 300dpi CMYK.

[Jaysen]

I replaced the HD on a dell with 72k and found that lowering the time to sleep on the drives also made a big difference. This will only work if ou have loads of ram and can turn off paging (virtual mem). Not sure how to do that on a mac yet, but i would probably advise agianst disabling swap (*nix term for virt mem). Especially for any memory intensive computing like graphics and audio processing.

If you are a casual user (surf the net, email and a few docs or photos) the price of ram is so low that maxing the system on ram to lower HD use (and hence wear and tear) might be a good idea. I know my next buy is another couple of GB of ram.

Anyway, let us know how the HD swap goes.

[mad0214]

Well I currently have a C2D Macbook that I just upgraded to 2 gigs of ram. I'm not a casual user either, I'm a graphic designer, podcaster and do some contract webdesign. On the twit.tv forums John Foster said they were louder, which was an immediate turnoff for me since I do record a weekly podcast ad I try to eliminate as much noise as possible, so I settled for a Seagate 120gb 5400 SATA Drive I got on newegg for about 90 bucks. I almost paid $120 for it at transintl.com. Since I got it so cheap, I also went ahead and ordered a 500gb LaCie external, since my other external was fried in a power outtage. So luckily, I was able to get a new, bigger drive and a huge external for a lot cheaper than data recovery on my macbook drive and then still having to be a new drive. I'm just glad I have that I have that backup dvd. The only pain will be downloading and installing all the apps I had.

Thanks for all the help!