Internal Hard Drive for Mac Book Pro

[cug]

I planning to purchase a Mac Book Pro and looking for advice on which internal hard drive to get. The internal SATA drive options are a 250GB at 5400 RPM and 200GB at 7200 RPM.

The idea is to install VI Special Edition, some of the Horizon libraries and a few other sample libraries on the internal drive for the portable composing rig. Occasionally I'll add an external FW 800 drive for larger VI libraries. I will also use the Mac Book in a network with a G5 Quad and possibly a G4 in a Vienna Ensemble cluster.

Is the 5400 RPM drive even worth considering? Any idea how many Vienna Instruments can be run on at 5400 RPM drive? Most of what I'm working on these days involves software instruments and very few, if any, audio tracks.

Thanks,

[felliniflex]

Hi Carlos, i'm a Macbook Pro owner who recently bought the VI Special Edition (a friend is bringing it to me from USA to Chile on may 28th), and all i can tell you is that you should definitely install the Vienna Special Edition on a separate fast (Firewire 800 or E-Sata) and keep the internal drive as clean as possible, that way the Mac should work faster (currently i have mine very loaded and is certainly getting a little slowerm in fact it's for me to do a full "cleaning process" before Viena arrives). I hope this can be helpful. Felipe Opazo

[stevesong]

 Carlos:

Get the 7200RPM internal drive AND purchase an external FireWire 800 drive dedicated to streaming samples. (For even faster performance, you could purchase an eSATA Carbus Express adapter and use a SATA drive in an eSATA enclosure.) The reason for purchasing the 7200 RPM internal drive is that it will make everything run faster - - but the samples need to stream from a drive dedicated to that purpose. 

[john_1332]

Dear Carlos,

I have a little experience in this area: I bought a MacBook Pro a few years ago (for a silent film gig!), and I originally partitioned the internal drive into three parts: system, projects and samples. This worked well enough, but later I wanted to run Windows in Boot Camp, and I had to un-partition the drive for this due to Boot Camp restrictions.

I then bought a Glyph portagig because it was 7200RPM and it needed no power supply. For some reason I was really reluctant to carry a power supply with the drive, even though they're not that big. I just didn't want the annoyance. While the Glyph drive is really nice, it's only 80GB and it was quite expensive, around $380 at the time, plus it is only Firewire 400.

If I were to re-do my setup today, I would probably do what Stephen Siegel suggests and use an eSATA card. I looked on macsales.com and found the Apiotech EC-0003D for $39. I don't know anything about this product and would personally do more research, but it looks very small and is cheap. It also fits into the slot on the MacBook Pro that I never use (thus freeing the two firewire slots). Then you could get a drive, like the Western Digital Quad interface My Book Studio for $196 for 750GB. I have two western digitals in my studio now, and the little power brick isn't that bad, it would easily fit in my backpack along with the cute little drive. With the money I save I could also buy a little portable drive for carrying large files, which is the other thing I use the Glyph for.

I just did a film project where the filmmakers bought me a little LaCie portable, bus powered drive. I mixed all the music for the film off that before I realized that it was only 5400RPM. Plus it only costs $99. My little Glyph is like the muscle car passed on the freeway by the Yaris. But hey, in the hard drive market today's bargain is tomorrow's regret. My little Glyph feels very unloved right now.

[cug]

@stevesong said:

Get the 7200RPM internal drive AND purchase an external FireWire 800 drive dedicated to streaming samples. (For even faster performance, you could purchase an eSATA Carbus Express adapter and use a SATA drive in an eSATA enclosure.)

 

Big thanks to Steve and all who replied. Sounds like 7200 RPM is the way to go for the internal drive and eSATA in the cardbus.

I've already got a mix of FW 800 and 400 Seagate drives, which I use with a G5 Quad and G4 Dual and I'm feeling like eSATA is in my future as well.

I posted the question because I was wondering what kind of performance I could get with the Mac Book Pro by itself (plus Vienna Key, of course).  The reason is that I spend a lot of time in airplanes and the external drive would just get in the way of my bleeping Merlot.  [:)]  

[john_1332]

I don't spend lots of time in airplanes, but I did allow for that in my setup. I keep my Sibelius Sounds Essentials on my internal drive (which takes about 3GB) plus all the factory Logic EXS sounds in the Library (about 2.6 GB). That way I can work on Sibelius or Logic projects with the bare-bones sounds.

[john_1332]

Had to add this to the mix --

http://gizmodo.com/393198/blazing-samsung-256gb-ssd-is-the-one-weve-been-waiting-for

[cm]

the correct text should read: ... the one we will have to wait for ...

those companies are great in announcing, but lazy in delivering ...

assumingly this piece will cost ~2.000 EUR or more during the first year ...

 

btw: we have a 64 GB pre-series model here and finally i was not so overwhelmed by the performance and throughput,

tests with a 128 GB model turned up regular peaks of 200 ms latency during writing ... seems some homework has still to be done

christian