Figuring Out the Speed Of Your Hard Drive

Alessia writes:

How can i check the speed of the hard disk drive in my macbook pro. Im not sure if its 5400 rpm or 7200rpm. I couldn’t find it on the section “about this mac”

You’re not alone in trying to find this. It would be very nice if Apple could somehow publish the speed of your drive in the ‘About This Mac’ specs on your computer. Here’s one way to figure it out though:

In the ‘About This Mac’ section, which it sounds like you’ve found but for those following at home you can find it by clicking on the Apple logo in the top left corner of your screen:

About This Mac

… and then clicking on ‘More Info’

More Info

Look under the Serial-ATA section of the ‘Hardware’ area. You should see a brand and model of your hard drive listed. In my case, it’s a Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00:

Hitachi Drive

Take that model number - again, mine is HTS541612J9SA00 but yours could be different brand/model number - and throw it into Google:



In my case I ended up at Hitachi’s web site (http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/5k160/5k160.htm) and could see that my drive was listed in a series that has a 5400rpm spin speed.

Hitachi Drive Specs

Once you see all the rest of the specs there, you could probably figure out from your original part number what the seemingly random numbers/letters mean.

HTS541612J9SA00

For my MacBook Pro’s drive, the “54″ is probably referring to the speed (5400rpm), the 12 is short for 120GB and “SA” stands for Serial ATA.

Your mileage may vary as it all depends on which manufacturer and model of hard drive Apple decided to use in your laptop and whether or not that particular manufacturer maintains an online list of their hard drives.

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