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Is my Mac’s internal hard drive slowing me down?
Hello,
I bought a early 2008 MacBook Pro a little while after the new Unibody ones came out. I went the cheap route and got it on clearance since it was the older model and also a student discount. Being that it was on clearance they didn’t allow me to customize it to include a 7200 RPM drive, just the default 5400RPM drive. I also wasn’t able to up the RAM but 2 gigs isn’t so bad I wasn’t sure if this was going to affect my performance since I do all of my work running off a USB 7200RPM external hard drive.
During a recent project on Premiere Pro CS4, I would not be able to view my work in the timeline, it was very choppy and after a while, I would no longer see video, just hear sound. And then even after a while, the sound would go away too. I would close the project and then load it back up and I would see the video files saying “Media offline” yet my external drive is still on.
The hard drive my work is running off of is a 1TB Western Digital MyBook which is a 7200 RPM external drive.
I’m just curious if the internal 5400 RPM drive is slowing me down and if it would be worth it to replace it (yes, i’ve looked at tutorials and already know how difficult it looks but I’m up for a challenge)
Also another thing that might be slowing me down is I’m currently running my MacBook Pro on an external monitor which does a resolution of 1680×1050. I know that the native resolution for the monitor on the laptop is lower than that. To get the MacBook to run in a higher resolution I basically have to put it to sleep and then wake it back up and close the laptop quickly before the laptops monitor turns on. That way I get a proper 1680×1050 and not a lower resolution which looks bad on that external monitor. Think that might have something with my slower performance?
Also, I’m editing HD footage, DVCPRO HD footage, but I’m editing it in a SD resoltion timeline (long story but now I shoot in 480p for most of my web work)
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3 Replies
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You may be a bit short on RAM. Although it’s SD, I would recommend 4 Gigs for CS4. The internal drive speed will be fine as long you only use it for your OS. The speed is too low for file storage or preview.
As external drive you may be fine as the Mybook, I’m assuming this connected via firewire an not USB ? Larger project may chooke though. A SATA drive with a SATA connection would be the way to go.
You also haven’t mentionned the CPU. This is what does most of the work in Premiere.
Regarding the use of a second screen, it again depends of the video card that’s in there.
Vince Becquiot
Director | EditorKaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Well my current specs of my MacBook Pro is 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The video card is a GeForce 8600M GT 256 MB
I just looked it up, it seems fairly easy (and cheep) to upgrade the ram in my MacBook Pro to 4 gigs so I’m already going to do that.
The one thing about the external drive. I actually have 2 MyBooks. One of them is a 500 gig that has firewire, USB 2.0 and eSATA. I connect it via Firewire. The second one is the 1 TB drive and only has a USB 2.0 connection (I goofed when ordering it, I meant to get the one with firewire). Is a firewire connection going to make that much of a difference as opposed to USB?
I think I’ll go for some more ram and see how that goes.
All of my programs (Premiere CS4, etc) are installed on that 5400 RPM drive with my OS but all of my media that I’m editing are on the 7200 external drives. That should be okay, right?
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Yes, Firewire will make a difference, but SATA is always best, especially on a Mac, which has poor USB support.
You could do this: (Note that you need to backup the drive before you do this and I am not responsible for any damage 🙂
The advantage is that you can then buy internal drives instead of spending you money on more expensive external enclosures.
I’m sure your Mybook has an internal SATA drive.You can purchase a cheap SATA/firewire enclosure (newegg.com is where I usually buy this stuff, great support), crack or break open your current Mybook case and get the drive out and place it in the new enclosure. All you need is the drive so it doesn’t matter if you break the external casing. Just be careful when you get to the drive itself. Again, all you need is the bare drive, not the internal card or anything elase inside the casing.
I may have second thoughts about recommending that on a forum but it’s really cheaper than tossing out a slow drive.
Vince Becquiot
Director | EditorKaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area
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