Introducing the World’s First 640GB Notebook (It’s a MacBook Pro)!

I’ve been doing a lot of photography with my Canon 5D Mark II 21MP camera, and each image taken in RAW format is about 25MB! So, needless to say, I’ve been using up a whole lot of hard drive space. Even though I upgraded my MacBook Pro to a 500GB drive a month ago, it’s only got less than 100GB left on it. So, I went looking for MORE!

Well, it turns out that Seagate is making a 640GB drive which will actually fit in a standard laptop. While there are a couple of other 2.5″ drives that are larger, they are also thicker and won’t work in most notebooks. So, the Seagate was what I wanted! Only problem – they aren’t selling it yet!

Doah! Well, no matter. Because I found out that I could buy a Seagate FreeAgent Go 640 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive from Amazon.com, and being the warranty voiding freak that I am, I had no problem with trying to rip the drive out of this case to stick in my laptop (the video of me doing just that is below). Here’s the Seagate PDF on the FreeAgent Go for more info.

Well, guess what. It worked! And now I’m posting this article from the world’s first laptop computer with a 640GB hard drive! Of course, that happens to be my 17″ MacBook Pro. Oh, and if you read along I’ll show you how you can do it too!

Performance Differences

After reading the review of the hard drive over on The Penguin Trail, here is the summary they gave:

Performance cannot match a 7200RPM notebook drive in many tasks, but the Seagate 640GB is no slouch. It can perform as fast or faster than lower density 7200RPM drives in streaming and other sequential tasks. Keep this drive defragmented and you can expect good all around performance. Of course, on top of that is huge storage capacity.

This left me wondering if getting the new bigger hard drive might actually perform as well as my smaller, faster turning 500GB drive. So, before I pulled out my old drive, I ran a series of tests on it with the help of AJA System Test. The following are screen captures from the tests along with a summary at the end if you’d like to skip ahead.

Original 500GB 7,200RPM Seagate Drive Performance

This is the drive that was in my machine, and it was only about a month old.

Disk Read/Write Speed

Sweep Video Frame Sizes

Sweep file Sizes

NOTE! Do you see how the performance of the 7,200 RPM drive drops off dramatically when dealing with large file sizes? This surprised me so much I ran the test three times! As you’ll see from the testing below, for some reason on large files this drive is actually slower than the 5,400 RPM drive that replaced it. And the Firewire G-Drive is just as fast even though it’s external! Amazing, unexpected, and really unforgivable.

New 640GB 5,400RPM Seagate Drive Performance

These are the results of the new drive after it was installed in my machine. How exactly did I do that you may ask? Well, I simply used the freeware app SuperDuper! to clone my existing hard drive onto the external USB drive. Then I disassembled the USB case and took the hard drive out to install in my machine.

Here is a little video of the disassembly of the USB drive that I did:

And you can do a search on Google to learn how to physically upgrade the hard drive in your MacBook Pro. If you’ve got a unibody it is very, very easy. If you’ve got the old style, you’re going to need a chainsaw. (I hope they fired the guy who designed the old ones!)

Disk Read/Write Speed

Sweep Video Frame Sizes

Sweep file Sizes

500GB G-Drive Mini Firewire 800 Drive Performance

Just for comparison’s sake, I also ran the tests on a G-Drive which is my portable that I put video files on. Turns out it’s smokin fast!

Disk Read/Write Speed

Sweep Video Frame Sizes

Sweep file Sizes

FreeAgent Go 640GB USB Drive Performance

And this is how the new drive performed when it was still in it’s original USB container. It seems that the limitations of the USB interface ensured that this drive doesn’t even reach half it’s potential. But I can’t wait to see what happens when they begin offering it with a Firewire 800 port. I would hope that it performs like the G-Drive, which will make for huge, fast, and compact mass storage on the go.

Disk Read/Write Speed

Sweep Video Frame Sizes

Results

Well, I must say that I didn’t know exactly what to expect when comparing the new 5,400 RPM drive to the 7,200 RPM drive, but I was pretty sure that the faster drive was going to run circles around the slower one. But apparently that is not always the case!

As you can see, the new drive performed the fastest in the Sweep File Sizes test, and even more shockingly, the G-Drive external hard drive even out performed the 7200 RPM drive mounted internally in the machine! By the way, I ran those tests multiple times to make sure it wasn’t an anomaly, and the computer was doing nothing else at the time.

Summary

Just to wrap up a couple other items:

• Although it was speculated that a 5,400 RPM drive should run cooler than the 7,200 RPM versions, I’m not sure if this is the case yet in my machine. I do use the free iStat Menus (which you should have if you’re on a Mac!) to monitor my system stats, but I didn’t think to check the hard drive temps before and after. However, my overall computer temperature is basically unchanged from normal.
• This new drive is supposed to be very energy efficient, but my old drive was so new that it was also pretty efficient too I think. So I’m not sure if this will cause any difference in my battery life.

Anyway, I guess the final report is that this definitely works. So you just have to make a decision… do you need the most hard drive space that money can currently buy? Or are you good with what you’ve got?

Cheers!