Ask Engadget: best non-SSD laptop hard drive?
By Darren Murph 
posted June 17th 2010 11:29PM
posted June 17th 2010 11:29PM
One thing Jason left out was his capacity requirements and actual budget, but we'll go ahead and assume he wants something larger than 40GB and cheaper than the average SSD. Any blazing HDDs out there for the taking? Go on, it's not like giving up your secret will make everyone reading this go buy up the remaining inventory. No promises on that, though."I am in the market for a 2.5-inch notebook drive for my new Core i7 MacBook Pro. The biggest concern for me is performance, with storage after that, and impact on battery life last. Every SSD I have seen is over my budget. I am wondering which hard drive will be the best non-solid state drive to fit in a MBP. Some people mentioned Seagate's Momentus XT, which is a hybrid drive -- are they any good? Thanks!"
My MBP runs Momentus XT right now. It feels at least twice faster than Hitachi @ 5400rpm, that Apple originally bundled. I do feel slightly more vibration, but not any more heat. Boot time I think was affected the most.
But such a simple task as showing my applications folder with around 300 applications inside was a difficult task before - taking several seconds for all icons to appear - now it is almost instant.
@SurgeArrest
agreed, Momentus XT, hybrid SSD and HDD. custom algorithms to put files/programs u access most on the SSD so it's lightning fast.
@SurgeArrest Why would any laptop manufacturer on a premium priced model give someone a 5400rpm drive? Boggles the mind.
I also still can't understand why Apple did not include SSD optimizations nor TRIM support for SSDs in the Snow Leopard update.
On most machines today, your harddrive is usually your performance bottleneck for everyday tasks. And even a really cheapo SSD like on the $250 Mini9 makes a world of difference compared to a slow platter drive:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7hc6qZ_PGI
Momentus XT
I'd definitely recommend the Momentus XT - it's the closest thing you'll find to an SSD for laptops in terms of performance, yet has the capacity of a regular hard drive.
I'd vouch for the Seagate Momentus XT. It will be at least another year until you can get an affordable SSD, plus Mac OS X lacks TRIM support anyway, so a hybrid drive's your best bet.
Seagate momentus 500gig 7200rpm $76 shipped at newegg.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148374
@redhotlama Looks like it has a somewhat high failure rate though from what the reviewers are experiencing...
@Velorium I have 2 7200.4 500GB drives that have been in use for around a year without problems. They occasionally start making some extra noise, but seem to be running fine. One was acting up enough to make me run the diag utilities but everything came back fine. That was months ago and its still running strong. I can usually sustain around 65-70MBps transfers between machines over Gigabit.
But I also do weekly full backups of my machines so I am not terrible concerned if the drive gives up the ghost. Important data I backup daily. I would have got a WD drive, but they didn't make a 7200rpm 500GB drive yet.
Momentus XT. Until there's TRIM support in OS X, a hybrid's your best bet.
Save your money and get an SSD anyway. If you paid for a new Core i7 MacBook Pro, I think you can wait long enough to get the best disk drive possible. Don't settle for anything less. An SSD is probably the most noticeable upgrade you can make to a computer after upgrading a machine with a small amount of RAM (i.e. 512MB -> 1GB-type jumps)
western digital scorpio black are meant to be good, but that seagate is also very good.
Well, given the fact that OS X doesn't support TRIM, any SSD is pointless anyways. I agree with the above comments, Momentus XT is the harddrive to get for laptops right now, especially MBPs. In fact, I would advise you to wait a couple of months, as more manufacturers are going to join the Hybrid hard drive fun that was suppose to have started a year ago.
Momentus XT is the most frequently discussed hard drive in this post.
I wouldn't touch a seagate if you paid me. Western digital Scorpio black for the best bang for buck with less likelyhood of failure. That firmware debacle a few years ago had me concerned about seagate products.
I'm in the market for something like this as well, and I'll be a little more specific about what I need. It's not something I'm immediately going to buy, just something to plan for.
I'd like to shoot for 640GB, if possible, and keep the price under $100 as well. However, it may turn out that I won't need something so roomy, so again, this is just for the sake of argument and/or for planning.
The Momentus XT sounds nice, but I think I'll wait for its price to coem down some.
I'm in the market for something like this as well, and I'll be a little more specific about what I need. It's not something I'm immediately going to buy, just something to plan for.
I'd like to shoot for 640GB, if possible, and keep the price under $100 as well. However, it may turn out that I won't need something so roomy, so again, this is just for the sake of argument and/or for planning.
The Momentus XT sounds nice, but I think I'll wait for its price to coem down some.
shouldnt have wasted money on a mac when you could get a better spec'd notebook for less.
@elduderino
But then they won't be cool.
@elduderino What do you recommend? I'm in the market.
@nilram i'd highly recomend a macbook. these laptops are the most durable EVAR! i'm typing this from the las gen ibook, trust me it still runs smoother than 60% of the laptops out there! just ordered my upgrade though- i'm entering college later this year and i'm gonna need moar power to do moar stuff, as i'll be coursing physics. i ordered a 15" core i5 mbp with a hitachi 500 hdd from eBay i found floating around 60€ (–80$)
@drkztan
Macbook for physics? You must be joking. I know it runs office (you will spend hours each day on excel) but the little programs that physicists make to do calculations don't run on macs. They barely run on PCs. I am doing physics and you need to run most of them in XP compatibility mode. I don't know if you can run a virtual machine on a mac but it is much safer to stick to a windows PC. Quite a lot of my fellow students run linux because that offers them even more compatibility. MATLAB and a mac isn't fun either apparently. I have a friend who is doing a PhD on quantum dots and the university gave him a imac to do it on. He brings his laptop in to work everyday to do all the technical stuff and then types up his results on the mac. You can run MATLAB on a mac but the version that your university will give out for free won't.
Momentus XT.
agree with elduderino on this one, if you are so concerned about drive prices why splurge for the tricked out mbp in the first place...seems counterproductive to say the least.
@jcoleis
I strongly agree, reminds me of a brand new $30,000+ pickup truck with a camper shell from the 1900's.
@jcoleis it could have been a gift, or they could have broken the budget buying the machine.
I replaced the stock Toshiba 5400rpm drive with a WD Scorpio Black 320GB 7200rpm (WDC WD3200BEKT-00F3T0). I have been very happy with it. Its speedier no doubt, but its no SSD. I was put off by the complaints about the Seagates and the "clicking", but they may have solved that by now. I got my drive about a year ago. It was like $70 on NewEgg.
One thing you should know is that the Macbook Pro's have their own sudden motion sensor in them. So you need to check whether the drive you are looking at has one or not. In most cases you should pick the version of the drive without the sensor and just use the one in the MBP so they don't conflict.
Get that kit where you can ditch the useless CD-ROM drive, and have a dual drive setup. Make your primary drive a small SSD, and use the other drive for storage.
@LloydChiro does software for this exist? Like some sort of "advanced" algorithm for smartly allocating data on drives based on use and SSD lifetime (kinda like what the XT does but with software)? That would be awesome.
@LloydChiro That's what I am planning on doing with my R61 Lenovo. Except since they are hot swap able I would leave the optical drive in till I needed something off the larger drive. I would like to have the benefit of faster speed and not having head over spinning platters to worry about most of the time. That way I could be a lot more mobile with my laptop without the risk of premature drive failure.
@hohums Why an algorithm? That can only add overhead and draw battery if both have to run all the time.
You have better data protection and performance just having two partitions. A boot partition (SSD) and a storage partition (big platter) that only turns on when you access movies, music, and other files stored on it.
@LloydChiro he sayd he wants a non-ssd-solution. otherwise you're right.
I recently bought a Hitachi 500GB 7200 RPM drive and have been happy with it. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145275
Big price but this is the last hard drive you will ever need, unless you want to get one of these and get an Optibay SSD (take out optical drive), of course you said no SSDs... but yeah, this fits in all macbook pros from what I've heard (you might want to double check that) a 1TB 2.5 inch hard drive, its slightly thicker than a regular hard drive which is why it isn't that mainstream. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136545&cm_re=2.5_1tb-_-22-136-545-_-Product
@j2daake That drive is going into my MBP 13 (Mid-2009). I did my research for a while before picking a drive. The only thing that is strange is the platter speed. The 1 TB drive has a 5200 rpm speed. That is slower than the majority of drives. Speed seems to be relatively fast because it is over 3 platters. I will compare it to the Scorpio drive in my MBP now when I get it.
If storage isn't a concern, save up and get a 64+GB SSD, trim support or not. You'll never turn back. If storage *is* a concern, get an SSD anyway, and pick up an external USB drive.
I was an 'early' SSD adopter and picked up two 32GB SuperTalent SSD's.. they're each rated ~170 read speed (the important part), and I have them in RAID-0 - I easily push 350mb/s+ for small writes, sustaned well over 270mb/s
Newer 64+GB drives are often rated at those RAID-0 speeds *each*! It's absolutely worthwhile.
Spinning platters are ancient history for an OS drive as far as I'm concerned.
@cicada edit: that was supposed to be 350mb/s+ for small *reads*, not writes.. writes are definitely slower (~90mb/s), but leaps and bounds faster than most spinning HDD's still.
Spent that much money on a MacBook...and now begrudging $130-$200 for an ocz agility or intel SSS? Seriously? This makes absolutely no sense to me.
Hitachi 7k500 or.... Momentus XT (if seagate has gotten their act together)
I recently bought a Momentus XT for my Sony VAIO FW and promptly swapped my old 7200rpm Hitachi 320GB back in. Assuming you have your OS caching function enabled, the speed difference for me was pretty minimal, except boot speed.
The biggest killer for me was that the XT has an auto spin-down function that you can't disable. It's very aggressive and often spun down at inopportune times for me, causing a second delay or so when the platters had to spin back up. Kind of defeats the purpose of the drive at times. Wish I had read the reviews/benchmarks a bit more closely!
Not knocking the drive since it actually does what it's supposed to, but I wanted to emphasize a point that many others seem to gloss over. I personally think it's more of a casual use drive and might be a bit disappointing for power users.
I'm surprised no one has mention this yet... would think it would be obvious... VelociRaptor anyone? Last time I checked, benchmarks have it performing noticeable better than the XT, and you get much more storage for the price than a Solid State. A 450GB 2.5 inch VelociRaptor is about $300. Wont break the bank like a SSD and it's the best performance you'll find outside of one too.
http://www.bestbuybusiness.com/bbfb/en/US/adirect/bestbuy?cmd=catProductDetail&showAddButton=true&productID=BB11103344
http://www.bestbuybusiness.com/bbfb/en/US/adirect/bestbuy?cmd=catProductDetail&showAddButton=true&productID=BB11099584
@Freakie
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?edc=2089632&enkwrd=ALLPROD%3a%28WD6000BLHX%29
Just found a cheaper price for the 600GB, if that extra 150GB is worth $30 (would be in my opinion). They're buggers to find, only two places that I've seen selling 2.5" VR's that isn't ebay.
@Freakie Dude, you have no idea what you are talking about. Read the question, OK?
@Freakie
You can't install a velociraptor in a laptop....for two reasons:
1) it won't fit,it is higher than normal 2.5 inch drives
2) there is a good reason why they come with an additional 3.5 inch heatsink.....installing a velociraptor in a laptop would fry it.
@gambiting
Actually the temps requirements are the same exact ones for any other WD laptop drive. I used to see VR's as options in a few laptops, but haven't seen that in over a year. It's been done, which is why you still can buy VR's without their bracket. But since it's a Mac, and Mac's suck with cooling, it might over heat...
But MBP do have room for extra tall drives if I recall, so it would fit.
If you don't mind "screwdriving" through some guarantee stickers, here's one solution that also takes care about (instantaneous!) backup/reuse of your old hard drive. What you do is get an external USB hard drive with a known good HDD inside (i.e. my 320GB Transcend StoreJet contained a nice Toshiba HDD) and exchange it with the one in your laptop - and that's it! A new, empty HDD is in your laptop, ready for a fresh install, and your old drive (with all of your old data) is now in a nice USB case and ready for access.
Ditto on the physics tip. But seriously, an ibook g4? I could not describe them as running "smooth", no matter what you do on it. They struggle with 480p youtube. 10.5 on a g4 is a joke and 10.6 isn't possible. I also wouldn't recommend buying hitachi laptop drives when you have choice, they're historically the least reliable and poorest performing brand, though some models could certainly be better than others.
Buy one of those on sale 60GB SSDs (about $130) and move the original HD over to your internal DVD space (like you ever really use it) with a mod that will cost you about $40. Put your system and your Apps on the SSD and you should be FLYING. Cost you just a little more than the momentus XT and it will improve way more than your startup times.
Momentus XT 500GB $129 @ newegg
so much faster than the Toshiba 500GB in my mid-2010 MBP i7... the 8GB upgrade helps too though.
the momentus xt is the perfect choice for you because it offers ssd-like performance in some scenarios, up to 500gb of storage, your second priority, only the power usage is a bit worse than a regular hdd, which you said is not that important to you.