Best/Fastest New Internal Hard Drive to buy?

10k RPM drives are still running on the warmer side of things here. I'd stay with the 7.2k models or slower for now.

Lots of problems with hybrid drives noted on web. I've burned through two of them in less than a year. I'd steer clear.

Me too. Seagate Momentus XT is a power hog and makes the fans run in my MackBook Pro

A lot of the issues with hybrid drives has a lot to do in how one uses it. If you copy a lot of files or watch a lot of saved movies or TV shows in iTunes you'll have a heat problem in most drives. With hybrid drives they can't keep up with the changes which burns them out. If they could make the SSD part an independent virtual drive then it makes sense! as you could image the OS files to it and lock it down. I see the next gen drives having this feature which will change the tables again.

Remember only the new '12 models have USB 3.0 If you have an older Mac stick with FireWire 800, USB 2.0 is to sloooowwww.

When I wrote my comment back in July, Apple hadn't disclosed their Fusion Drive yet. Boy was I close ;-} The only rub with their solution is it requires two SATA connections. I hope we'll see some single SATA units that have both a platter drive and SSD as independent drives in one unit and can be virtualized like a Fusion Drive, how about it Seagate & Western Digital time is a wasting!!

Thailand had a major flood in the area were must HD's are manufactured (ref: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardw...) As such HD prices have jumped up quite high during the spring & summer and just this fall the prices have started to drop back to what they where before the flood. I suspect your seeing the difference in price from that, as well as the cut rate pricing Amazon often has. Think about service here before you buy from anyone. Also note it's the end of the year so many stores maybe trying to push out old inventory.

Richard - You did go backwards here on performance SSD's are quicker than platter HD's but the cost per meg is much lower with HD's and they also tend to be larger. The issue is balancing out speed Vs size (as well as power & space in the case of laptops).

As to your Profiler reporting under storage and only seeing a yellow bar. Not sure why you see that. I have no problems with 3rd party HD's in seeing their file breakdown with Lion or Mountain Lion. You may want to re-partition & format the HD also make sure you have set the SATA I/O speed correctly for the drive given the systems age you may need to jumper the drive so it's SATA II compatible. This could also explain overly slow response.

Dan, Thank you for your quick reply. After considering options, I decided to go back to the SSD. I moved photos and films to an external drive and have now about 40GB free on the laptop. The SSD speed is just amazing and it is key for my work. Now, I need to find an owner for the new 750 GB 7200 Seagate SATA Hard Drive.

Best regards,

Richard

It uses a ExpressCard/34

This is really only usable on the systems which have a SDXC card slot (newer MacBook Pro retina & MacBook Air systems). Not usable in this series of MacBook Pro's.