Hey guys,
I just bought a macbook pro 13.3" and its awesome. The only thing that bothers me is that small HD size. I want to upgrade my HD - any recommendations? How do I know which hard drives "fit" in the macbook? I am guessing the 2.5" ones do.. I don't want to spend more that 80-100 and prefer a hard drive with 500GB or more. Any specific recommendations?
Thanks!
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pretty much any 2.5" sata 9.5mm height drive.
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Any thoughts / experience with the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS 500GB?
http://cgi.ebay.com/500GB-7200-Lapt...ltDomain_0&hash=item5d2d020ff7#ht_1846wt_1139
Thanks! -
That will work fine. It will be a touch quicker that the stock hard drive.
But for what its worth, I would buy from newegg.com instead of ebay. -
Cool - thanks so much!
Since I'm already ordering the hard drive, any other upgrades I should consider buying for my macbook? -
If you can fit it in your budget, this one will be the fastest you can get at the $100 level.
Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive -
Yep, go for the hybrid drive. It's in between a HDD and SSD in speed, but capacity and price of HDD.
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Hitachi 7k500, 7200 RPM, 500GB, 16mb Cache. I replaced my stock drive with this, and performance has literally doubled. It's doesn't vibrate my case, and sound wise is as quiet as stock.
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Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB Review (WD5000BEKT) | StorageReview.com
According to this, it's slightly faster and $30 cheaper than the Seagate. Unless I'm missing something here.
Newegg.com - Western Digital Scorpio Black WD5000BEKT 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive -
@Asherek: One is hybrid drive, the other isn't.
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The momentus XT is the fastest drive you can get for the $100 price point.
Unless you jump to a full fledged SDD for hundreds of dollars, the momentus xt is THE drive to get.
If you are looking to keep it under the $100 prince point, any current generation 7200rpm drive will be about the same in actual real-world performance. -
I doubt the WD is actually faster, though. It may be faster in terms of raw sequential reads/writes, but it's probably way slower in IOPS, 4kb reads/writes, etc. and that's what dictates how fast OS boots up, programs open and operate, etc. Sequential is only for coping files.
I don't know how the drives compare in reality, I'm just saying that's the theory behind it and you have to look into the details. -
Thus, I'm wondering if I'm missing something about the Seagate being the best to use, seeing as the WD outperforms it and is cheaper. -
Hmm, judging by that article, it's kinda inconclusive... The Momentus XT doesn't seem to be jumping way up in 4k reads/writes, which is where I'd expect it to excel. However, perhaps it depends on the size of test file they were using. If it's too large for the SSD-portion of the hybrid drive, perhaps it loses its edge. Maybe it would be faster on a smaller test file.
Anyway, it the conclusion they do say...
"And while the drive [WD Scorpio Black 500 GB] is sometimes bested by the Momentus XT in benchmarks, the Western Digital runs $45 less at retail, which makes it a great value for a high capacity performance oriented hard drive."
So I can't really say. I think the only way to know for sure is to buy each drive, and test them under real-world conditions. I've never owned a hybrid drive myself, so I can't vouch for their performance... I just know in theory they're supposed to offer some of the SSD-like speed advantages, and I can attest to (fast) SSDs being super noticeably fast!
My guess is they're both almost equally fast; either will be a fine choice. -
toyota_scion_tc Notebook Consultant
There have been a few Firmware upgrades for the Seagate Momentus XT as well, not sure exactly what they were for. I have a Momentus XT 320GB in my MacBook Pro and love it. For me SSD's are not worth it, I have owned a few and they do degrade in performance and I had random files start disappearing, (not caused by a virus). The Momentus XT and the WD Black Scorpio drives are scored identical under Windows 7 hardware (both 5.9).
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Hard Drive for my new Macbook Pro
Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by giaviv, Jan 25, 2011.