Macbook harddrive upgrade

pcbscott

Hi,

Im thinking of upgrading the HD's in my black macbook and my sisters white macbook, I came across this website

http://www.macupgrades.co.uk/store/machine.php?name=macbook#int-hdd

Has anyone dealt with them before? They seem to have pretty comprehensive listings for mac products and the prices seem to be fair esp compared to any Irish offerings.

Is there somewhere else I should look?

Western Digital Scorpio 320GB 2.5" SATA 5400RPM£38.02 + vat (£44.67)



Seagate Momentus 7200.4 250GB 2.5" SATA 7200RPM£36.17 + vat (£42.50)

These are the two I was looking at the 5400 rpm has a 16mb cache and the 7200 only 8mb, Do I need 16? or will 8 suffice?

Im not really sure what the better option is. £45 is def as much as I want to spend and the difference of 70gb between the is much less of a concern than performance.

alexlyons

Any 2.5" sata drive will work, just make sure the dimensions are the same as the current drive. Some drives may be thicker than what is currently in there and as a result won't fit.

As regards to the cache size, it depends what you're doing. The 7200rpm drive will suck a good bit more juice out of the battery, especially on the old black book, the same on the white one if its the same age. An older battery will have poorer performance as it is, so a 7200rpm drive will really make a difference compared to say a new Macbook pro.

A tip for looking for info on mac's.

State the age of your machine, time of year bought if known. It helps us know what you're using and what is compatible.

Tell us what you use the machine for. web and email require different hardware than video, and different again for audio etc.

Tell us what you want to achieve. More HD space, better performance overall, faster boot times etc. Different bits of hardware do different things to the machine.

Give us a budget to work with as well.

Not saying you didn't do all of these (you did mention budget), just a general few tips, for anyone reading.

pcbscott

Thanks for your reply,

The black macbook is mine, it was one of the early ones around 2006 but not the very first black macbook.

Its 2.0 ghz Core 2 Duo and has 1g of Ram.

I actually plan to sell it as Ive upgraded to a Macbook Pro

It has been sitting in a draw since the HD failed over a year ago,

So with this one I'm really trying to maximize resale value, perhaps I would be better updating the ram and adding a slower hard drive?

The white macbook my sister also bought around 2006 I think, its one of the early predecessors to the Ibook and the HD is only 60g.

She takes a lot of photos so this is the main reason for upgrading this as she has long since run out of space; other than that she listens to music and surfs the net. Performance not such an issue but It would be nice to make her machine run like new or better again!!:)

thanks

alexlyons

I'd just put any HD in the black book, no need for anything special. Its specs dictate that anyone who will buy it won't be a high end user. The cheapest one you want will be fine. If find cheap ram then you could, but I doubt you'd get back what you paid for the ram.

Photographs is a different story. Where is she storing them now? an external? are they backed up?

If there are no plans to upgrade her Macbook within the next year, put the best HD you can afford into it. the difference between 5400 and 7200 won't be major. saving on that and getting an extra 50GB for example could be beneficial, or buying an external for a second backup off site, which is vital IMO.

Put the new drive in, clone the system over and you're away. Put the photos on the new drive. Here is what I would suggest, assuming there is 300GB of photos (something else you could have included!)

New 500GB - boot drive
Old external, guessing 500GB - offsite backup of all photos
New 1TB external - Time Machine backup of the whole system.
Old 60GB - forget about it

I don't really like Time Machine, but for simplicity it is a good solution

For someone like me, a bootable clone of my system is vital, and much easier in my Mac Pro. You could have the old external as this, and keep it offsite, backed up weekly. That way if the Macbook ever gives up, you can boot into your, at most week old, system and restore any other files with Time Machine. Ideally a bootable clone should be the same size as your actual boot drive.

You should keep between 15-20% of your boot drive free as the system uses the HD for swap files and it will generally run much better.

akadesign

Heres a couple of drives that should work nicely. Although you will get a better deal on eBay just type in 2.5" SATA, as alexlyons said be careful some drives are physically larger especially the 1TB drives.

For RAM go here crucial is by far the most reliable suppliers out there, no nasty kernel panics.

bastados

Looking at upgrading a macbook I have at home with a new internal HD and wondering whether I could use one of the new 2.5" SSD's in it but am just not sure whether it'll work as I have an old ATA drive 2006 or maybe a bit earlier...and the market seem to be awash in SATA drives.

its a 13" macbook 2 ghz intel Core 2 duo..............thanks