I am looking to upgrade the hard drive in my Macbook with a 120 gb drive.

I have heard Seagate drives are quiet but how about other brands? Samsung? Hitachi?

100 gb 7200 RPM drives vs 100 gb 5400 drives?

Looking for opinions.

Linda

Lately for me it's been a matter of which manufacture has what I want. For example, I went with the Seagate 160GB 2.5" drive for my PowerBook because they are the only company that makes one that large. Prior to that I was going with IBM which became Hatachi. I tend to lean towards capacity over speed. 7200rpm is GREAT, but I would rather have the extra 20GB of space at 5400rpm. There are 200GB drives on the horizon, however they are only at 4200rpm (at least initially) and that's a bit two slow in my opinion.

So if you want speed go with a 100GB 7200rpm drive. If you want space go with a 120GB 5400rpm drive. No problems thus far with Hitachi or Seagate.

I'm anxiously waiting for Seagate to release their 160GB model in SATA format so that I can upgrade my MacBook Pro.

Terry,

I was leaning towards the space over speed, never seem to have enough storage. Thanks.

Curious, isn't the 5400 vs 7200/ 120 vs 100 gig drive size a heat issue? As opposed to a space issue?

Linda

Heat shouldn't be an issue with 7200rpm drives in any of Apple's PowerBooks or MacBooks.

Hitachi (formerly IBM) hard drives used to operate about 10˚F higher in temperature than the competition. They used different bearings. I don't know if that's still true.

Drive Savers says all HD manufacturers have improved their products to point where all have the same overall failure rates. They ought to know. Certain models of some hard drives have high failure rates. Research those, and avoid them.

Is the HDD height important? Are some too BIG to fit into certain laptops?

Is the connector design important among parallel interface HDD's?

Yes, absolutely, about size. Also, I know some IBM ThinkPads had odd connectors for their drives. I think that there may be standardized connectors now, but I'd get a drive that is known to work in your particular system.