1TB HDD (12.5mm/2.5") drive in MBP13/15/17 - Success

[loop]

Just want to let you know that you can safely & nicely install a 12.5mm 2.5" in the Unibody MBPs. Physical installation in the laptop is simply great - like it was designed to hold these drives (probably it was ). I did it in 13", but the 15 & 17 will do as good.

Similar drives (12.5mm) are available also from WD (750G & 1TB, I think). The add thickness is because they are 3 platters, vs the usual 9mm, 2 platter drives.

I've got the 1TB Toshiba @ 5400rpm (MK1059GSM) and am very happy with. The previous disk was a 500G Momentus 7200.4, but the Toshiba seems to be doing just great! It's much more silent now and double the space! And almost as fast too. And it costs me just about 85EUR (tax incl) from a retail shop here. I'm very happy.


Think i'll postpone the OptiBay/DualDrive (SSD addtion) purchase for now. The 1TB Toshiba appears to be a very adequate solution based on 2-3 days of use & testing.

[Audeo]

And with that I assume you put it in the original HDD space?

[loop]

yes, in the original hdd space

[Karlos Santos]

Good work. Im currently sat waiting for Carbon Copy Cloner to finish on a new Seagate 750/7200.

12.5 drives only fit in Unibodies with the CD drive on the right.

[loop]

I used the OS X install DVD to do the cloning. ~450GB of data in about 10hours over USB including the data verification.

i also tried with CCC, but it's much slower.

the instructions for this method are:
1. boot from the installation DVD
2. Start Disk Utility from the Utilities menu in the installer
3. perform a "restore" using the old drive as source and the new as destination.
3a. alternatively, if you have a time machine backup of your current data, the OS X installer allows you to restore your system from it. Did with the previous disk upgrade and it's perfect.

[fullenglishpint]

what do you guys think my best option would be for cloning my HDD onto my new SSD? I'll be doing it in a couple of weeks when I go home for the easter weekend. I have a 250GB drive in atm, have a 240 SSD and a 750 WD HDD with optibay waiting for me.

My plan is to clone the existing HDD onto the SSD (what is the quickest way? was gna temporarily stick the SSD in the optibay and CCC it over) then switch over and put the 750 in the optibay and move my home folder across.

Any better ideas?

[Karlos Santos]

Yeah i did a Time Machine restore but it failed twice. Turned out to be a bad drive, so i sent it back.
Using CCC because my pal uses it and its worked every time.
I was gonna do Time Machine or restore with Disk Utility but i just thought id give CCC a go.

Looking like its gonna finish around the 8 hour mark on 470gb.
If it doesnt work ill just use Disk Utility restore. The Time Machine fail has put me off a bit.

[Audeo]

The way I did it was to copy all important things to a external HDD, think twice about what I copied and what else needed copying

Grounded myself, then opened the MBP up, unplugged the battery, took out the Optical unit, took out the original HDD. grounded myself again, put the SSD in, put the new HDD in the optibay and into the MBP, plugged in the battery, screwed the bottomplate back to the MBP, flipped it over and installed OSX from a USB drive.

In short, a fresh install is always better. Also, unplug the battery during install to avoid electrical issues and to reset the SMC (this is to avoid any future issues).

[loop]

LOL Karlos - the CCC failed me twice for some reason and i left it behind . Good to hear it was a defective drive and you caught it so early. I always do a full format or a full read/write test on a new drive before i put it in production.

the installer approach is definitely faster in my experience. The restore is doing "bit copy" operation with the "dd" command(almost sure bout that), which is more optimal then the rsync approach of CCC. If you have a USB time machine backup, it's also a good option, as you can install the new drive internally and push the "suck" button from the USB backup

it's likely that your SSD disk will come with both SATA and USB ports. If so, i'd boot the installer, connect the SSD with USB, while the old drive is still inside and use the "Restore" option from Disk Utility.

[fullenglishpint]

I have a 1TB time machine (which hasn't been updated since october because i left it in England), so I guess I could just update the time machine (which I would do anyway as an insurance policy) and then swap out the drives and restore over USB with the OSX disc...

Would that be significantly slower than any of the other drive cloning options?