What a great decision that was! I swapped out my 160gb 5400 HD that came with my MBP with a 750gb 7200 HD. Took about 3 hours to clone the new HD from my old one, and took less than 10 minutes to do the physical swap out! Now I can have all my music on my computer and do away with the external HD i was using for my music. I am still running a weekly backup of my music and taking my external to gigs with me just incase anything happens to my computer I can just burn some CDs with my latest music…
With the new HD i think my computer is running a lot better, not that it was bad before, but it just seems faster.
Just thought I would share, its a simple upgrade, and fairly cheap as well. Total cost was $112 and that included shipping of everything needed.
$89 - Seagate 750GB Momentus Mobile Hard Drive - 750GB, 2.5", 7200RPM, 16MB, SATA (TMD-750AS)
$13 - Sabrent EC-UST25 Hard Drive Enclosure - 2.5" SATA to USB 2.0
$9 - two day shipping
All from Tiger Direct.
If anyone wants the link to the directions I used let me know!
This is actually very misleading information dude.
I did exactly what Lance did a few months ago with a WD Scorpio Blue. I have always used Western Digital HDs and have always had good results.
It was an unmitigated disaster.
There has been a HUGE amount of people with issues with the Scorpio Blue HDs and Macs (Unibody around 2009). Its well documented on their forums.
I tried numerous times to get the HD working even installing nothing else but Snow Leopard… I suffered whats called the Rainbow Circle of Death or Beachballing when attempting to do anything.
I swapped the drive for the exact model that Lance has and its done 3 x 5h hour gigs every week for months without a single hic up.
Bizarrely enough my pal used the same WD HD in his older Mac and it worked fine but its not a Mac issue. The WD forum is full of people having issues.
btw - i did my swap/back up with Time Machine and Migration Assistant. Flawless.
I replaced the original 160gb with a 500gb scorpio blue a week after I bought mine, never looked back
Karlos, was the early 09 the one with issues? mine is a mid and never had one. HD still running great. Bought the drive in april '10 so might be a different model.
I had the same problem with the Scorpio Blue.. finally found out it was a conflict between the HDD energy saving firmware and energy conservation software built into latter versions of MAC OSX. I added an apple script to my startup routine to disable the MAC energy conservation control within OSX and that solved the problem. The beach ball of death is the result of the aforementioned conflict whereby the drive is cycling into and out of sleep.
Whaaaaaaat?! What model do you have? I haven’t tried to take apart my late 2010 model apart yet but it doesn’t seem as easy as previous iterations. If it’s really this easy I am totally going to do this.
The only rason it took 10 minutes was because I had to go search for my T6 torx. It would have taken about 5 minutes if I had that on hand when I started… My MBP is a late 2010 model…
