How to: MacBook Pro 7200 RPM Hard Drive upgrade w/ results

Note: This post was originally posted on Nov. 17, 2007.

Before Apple released Leopard, I wanted to speedup my MacBook Pro, which came standard with a 5400 RPM SATA laptop drive. It’s (at the time I purchased it) a stock MacBook Pro, with the Intel 2.33 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 Gb of RAM and of course the 5400 RPM SATA drive.

The MacBook Pro has the capability of being a kick ass laptop, after all its the fastest windows laptop sold. To get desktop performance out of my MacBook Pro I decided to upgrade the hard drive to a 200 Gb 7200 PRM SATA Hitachi 2.5 inch drive, one which I purchased from Newegg.

The upgrade was easy, the only problem I ran into was the cable for the touch pad and the strip of tape holding it to the drive covered the new drive’s breathing hole. Once installed, I reinstalled Tiger (remember, before Leopard was released).

My results from Xbench are listed below, I tested each drive four times.

5400 RPM stock Apple drive:

Drive test average: 29.66 (best: 35.29, worst: 14.57)
Total score average: 97.79 (best: 110.03, worst: 66.27)

7200 RPM Hitachi drive (replacement):

Drive test average: 41.74 (best: 43.07, worst: 39.97)
Total score average: 116.62 (best: 118.68, worst: 112.55)

Without the drive test, my MacBook Pro receives a score of 166.18, so you can see how the drive test can drag the score down.

Just for something to compare this 7200 RPM 2.5 inch drive to, the standard 250Gb 7200 RPM SATA drive that came stock in my Mac Pro benchmarks at 51.02 (disk test only), although, with a Western Digital Raptor RAID array (two 36 Gb 10,000 RPM SATA “Raptor” drives in RAID 0 (32k blocks)) gets a score of 114.24 (disk test only).

The 2.5 inch 200 Gb Hitachi 7200 RPM drive that I put into the MacBook Pro gives near desktop performance, and makes a noticeable difference in day to day use, applications launch quicker and OS X feels quicker overall. 7200 RPM drives are the standard for desktops, and should be the same for laptops.

For those wondering which drive I used, here’s a link to it Hitachi 200 Gb 7200 RPM 2.5 inch SATA hard drive.