Upgrading Macbook pro

[Jason Cerna]

i have a mid2010 mbp and i upgraded the oem 250GB hdd to a 7200 500GB model from seagate. i'm happy with the upgrade.

[Dynamics]

My DJ partner just upgraded from last friday from 120gb 5400 to 500gb 7200. It's much faster, especially when we're producing. We used to have to bring an external hard drive for the music as the old 120gb HD was already completely filled.

3 negative experiences that I've experienced with him, and an additional 2 more that he's experienced. 2 of which were during a gig, another 2 right before a gig. I think about 3 of the 5 resulted in the loss of the entire external (500gb almost completely filled.)

I would definitely get the upgrade. It's not worth losing mountains of GBs over, and then having to retrieve that much 3 times over.

[nath_b]

I just bought the 500gb Momentus XT 7200rpm from OWC -

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/YST9500562AS/

Comes with everything you need to backup and upgrade your internal drive. Haven't recevied it yet so can't comment on it's performance but the Seagate website claims it to be within seconds of the performance of an SSD -

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-au/pro...ps/laptop-hdd/

Looking forward to upgrading my measly 120gb internal so I can fit my tunes on there. I'm currently using a Laice external for the bulk of my music and although it has never failed on me I have always been concerned about it.

I want to move away from having an external... if your internal fails then you're pretty much screwed anyway even if you have an external drive with music on. Unless that is, if your booth has some CDJ2000's or similar with a USB in? No CDJ2000's where I play so if my laptop fails then I always have a CD wallet with me just in case. I've been using Torq since V1 and it's only ever crashed twice during a gig where I've needed the CDs but glad I had them...

[padi_04]

you can make a bootable partition on your external

[nath_b]

you can make a bootable partition on your external

Very true... I hadn't actually thought of my external being a bootable image as I was using it for mp3 storage only. Probably a good idea I guess, however if it was more than a HD failure a bootable image still wont save you so always a good idea to have a plan B. I make a habit of leaving a CDJ cued up during my set just in case...

I might re-image my external as bootable after I install the new drive... Thanks for the tip.

[nath_b]

My drive arrived Friday but I held off on replacing it in my macbook until Sunday as a precaution. I had a gig Saturday night and had read that a few people replacing their own drives had torn their ribbon cables and didn't want that happening without enough time to buy a replacement.

Everything went well and I am definitely noticing speed improvements in opening apps and reading my music directories that were already on my previous internal. Haven't transferred over all my external music yet but looking forward to not requiring my external drive at my gig this weekend.

I can recommend the OWC kit that I posted earlier, it came with all the tools required for the swap, the external USB 3 case included was awesome, helped me clone my internal (using SuperDuper! on Mac... not included in the kit) with ease and now I have a new external, albeit only a 120gb 5400 drive, that I can use as a backup.

I'd never replaced a laptop drive before so I followed this guide -

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/I...lacement/486/1

Hope it helps.