Hard drive upgrade for Macbook Pro (late summer 08)
Hello, I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2.53gHz with a 320 HD installed. I would like to upgrade to either a 500 gig 7200 or a 640 5400
Here are the links to each:
Seagate Momentus 7200
and:
Western Digital 640 gig
Before I make a purchase I would like to ask advice to see if anyone has had noise, heat or vibration problems with a 7200 hard drive?
I don't mind sticking with a 5400 if that is the case, just curious.
thanks a lot for your input.
Here are the links to each:
Seagate Momentus 7200
and:
Western Digital 640 gig
Before I make a purchase I would like to ask advice to see if anyone has had noise, heat or vibration problems with a 7200 hard drive?
I don't mind sticking with a 5400 if that is the case, just curious.
thanks a lot for your input.
Comments
Hello, I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2.53gHz with a 320 HD installed. I would like to upgrade to either a 500 gig 7200 or a 640 5400
Here are the links to each:
Seagate Momentus 7200
and:
Western Digital 640 gig
Before I make a purchase I would like to ask advice to see if anyone has had noise, heat or vibration problems with a 7200 hard drive?
I don't mind sticking with a 5400 if that is the case, just curious.
thanks a lot for your input.
First off I would put the best dam drive I could in my MacBook Pro and in my opinion you can't get any better than a Hitachi drive. Reason? It' costs plenty to open that baby up (if the drive isn't user accessible), you want to do it right and only once and don't want to have any problems for the rest of the life of the machine.
You might have to do it yourself, there are videos on OtherWorld computing or have a tech friend do it. You could be violating your warranty/Apple Care if you don't use Apple, and then they could insist they only use crappy Seagate drives.
If you use your MacBook Pro disconnected from the power most of the time, then you should get a 5,400 RPM drive.
However if you use your MBP more like a desktop machine with occasional battery use, then I would consider the 7,200 RPM for more performance.
Heat? Noise? Vibration? You can't tell the difference really with laptop drives. Desktop drives sure.
Either with a 5,400 RPM or a 7,200 RPM drive on a laptop, you should always minimize shock regardless.
Check the specs, reliability, price, user reviews, read/write speeds of various drives before making a decision. Sure there is a site or two that does that.
If you don't know already, learn how to clone your boot drive to a external Firewire drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. (repair permissions afterwards on both) It's rather easy. Then you can hold option and boot from it, even reverse clone onto the new drive without having to bother with anything.
Always use Disk Utility and Erase with Zero option any new drive once before using it as this checks every sector on the drive and maps off the bad ones ahead of time.
If your MBP has a removable battery, get a extra one. All batteries fail and at the worst moment too.
The Macbook's hard drive is removable. you can buy a Macbook Pro with the lowest Hard Drive and then just go to Best Buy and purchase a better HD after.