You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
I need a new hard drive, for my ageing MacBook - 160gb just isn't cutting it. How much difference does spin speed make? If I go for a 1tb drive I'm limited to a 5400rpm spin, if I go for 750 or 500gb then I can get something with a 7200rpm speed and a bigger cache.
How much difference will this make to speed? It'll be mostly used for editing photos in Lightroom.
Alternatively, which drive would you recommend? At least 500gb, SATA 2 2.5" and budget of around £70, but the less the better...
Not a vast difference to that usage. Your usage requires single large quantity data transfers , you might shave half a second off a large image load but the bulk of your editing will be done in RAM, meaning you never see the benefit until the end. I edit photos over a LAN link ton my NAS, my computer has a nippy but small drive.
That's really interesting! I was thinking about getting an external drive and editing over that, but I thought the USB2 connection might be annoyingly slow.
I'll be doubling the RAM as well (currently 2gb, going up to a max of 4).
I doubt you'd notice that much difference in speed. But I'd replace the old hard drive with a new one, then buy a cheap usb caddy online and put the 160gb in there