Using a WD My Passport drive as an internal upgrade?

scottny

Hi all,



I've been searching all day and hope you guys can help.



I have a late 2006 MacBook Pro (2.33 GHz) that can only accept 9.5 mm internal HDs. I also have a new Western Digital My Passport Essential SE (link) and want to use that as an internal drive, and put my current 120 GB internal drive in that enclosure.



I called WD and the technical support person said the drive is 9.5 mm tall and uses SATA, which means it would work exactly as planned.



But if he was wrong and I break open the drive and it doesn't work, I'm out $90 (I got it on sale) and I'll void the warranty. And the WD site shows that all their internal notebook drives are 12.5 mm, so where would this 9.5 mm drive come from? It is special for this enclosure? Are they using a third party hard drive? Or did the tech lie to me or guess?



Has anyone opened this drive, or know if this drive is actually 9.5 mm tall? If not, has anyone installed a 12.5 mm drive in a MacBook Pro this old?



Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.



-Scott

kingofsomewherehot

2006... Were Apple's internal HDDa using SATA connection at that point? ... If so, it should work just fine (assuming a 9.5 height.)



You can open the drive without wrecking it. It'll still work as an external if it doesn't fit inside the Mac. Odds are, you won't need the warranty anyhow.

scottny

Thanks for the reply. I confirmed with System Profiler that this machine does indeed have a SATA interface for the internal HD. But I have also confirmed (as much as I can without opening the enclosure) that the drive inside the Passport is 12.5 mm. Seems Western Digital doesn't make a 1 TB 9.5 mm laptop drive (yet).



But I am now buying this, which is 9.5 mm and 7200 rpm, and I'll use the Passport as a local Time Machine backup since my current backup is over a slow network.