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Upgrading My HDD

Mikeh12

Mikeh12

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 19, 2010
77
0
Liverpool
Hi,

I've been trying to find an answer to this for a couple of hours, but still no luck.

First of all, I'm looking for a new HDD for my MacBook (Late 2008 13" Aluminum model). I was thinking of picking up a WD 1TB Scorpio Blue. Some people on forums have said it doesn't fit their enclosure, some have said it does. Do I risk going for this HDD or get a 750GB Scorpio Black?

The Scorpio Black drive's are only made in 7200RPM models, and this will apparently be very loud in my MB, anyone got any experience of this?

Also, I saw mentioned on another forum that any HDD over 700GB will run slowly because of certain Intel chipsets, and I'll need to download a lot of new drivers. Any truth in this?

I'm also open to new suggestions about drives, preferably towards the higher end of the storage spectrum.

Regards,

Michael
 
N

Nikh

macrumors regular
Jun 15, 2010
182
3
Kyiv
Hm, all 2.5" HDDs should have the standard size, because it's standard, thus fitting the enclosure.

Recently I changed my HDD to SSD - and it's so fast, that I don't even think about returning to HDDs. However, big SSD are too expensive, but if you will store all work data (really, it doesn't need that big drive) on SSD, and music/video on external drive it should be ok.

Also, btw, there are special cases to replace DVD-RW with the second hard drive, so you can combine fast SSD for system with large HDD for data.
 
alust2013

alust2013

macrumors 601
Feb 6, 2010
4,779
2
On the fence
I have a 320GB Scorpio black in my aluminum macbook, and it's really not very loud at all. Maybe a little bit more than the stock drive, but it's only noticeable in a very very quiet environment. You could also get the 1TB drive, which will certainly fit in your computer.
 
A

anotherarunan

macrumors 6502
Sep 18, 2007
372
61
London, United Kingdom (UK)
I dont think the 1tb drive will fit your MB - even though its still a 2.5" drive - i think its the height of the drive that makes it too big - not 100pc sure - but i remember reading the biggest your MB will fit is 750gb.
 
A

aleXXXps

macrumors member
May 4, 2011
79
1
I have a regular white MacBook that I bought about a month ago, and was going to upgrade my hard drive as well. If I purchase a 500gb 5400rpm drive, that should work right? And I didn't fully research OS installation yet, but I should be able to just clone my current drive onto the new one, right? I spent so many hours installing applications and transferring photos, music, documents, etc. over to the new MacBook when I bought it and don't want to do it all over again.
 
-tWv-

-tWv-

macrumors 68000
May 11, 2009
1,583
2
Ohio
aleXXXps said:
I have a regular white MacBook that I bought about a month ago, and was going to upgrade my hard drive as well. If I purchase a 500gb 5400rpm drive, that should work right? And I didn't fully research OS installation yet, but I should be able to just clone my current drive onto the new one, right? I spent so many hours installing applications and transferring photos, music, documents, etc. over to the new MacBook when I bought it and don't want to do it all over again.
Click to expand...

Yes, this hard drive will work, but you will need some sort of external enclosure or SATA to USB adapter to clone the drive (I have one if you need it.) After that you can just switch out the hard drives and the Macbook should boot fine to the new one.
 
-tWv-

-tWv-

macrumors 68000
May 11, 2009
1,583
2
Ohio
alust2013 said:
I have a 320GB Scorpio black in my aluminum macbook, and it's really not very loud at all. Maybe a little bit more than the stock drive, but it's only noticeable in a very very quiet environment. You could also get the 1TB drive, which will certainly fit in your computer.
Click to expand...

I have the same exact drive and I agree, I only notice the noise when its extremely quiet, and it does vibrate a little more than the stock 5400rpm drive but it isn't really an issue.
 
A

aleXXXps

macrumors member
May 4, 2011
79
1
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

Actually I upgraded it yesterday and all I had to do was a time machine backup to my 1tb external prior to swapping the hard drives. When I put the new one in, I booted with my snow leopard DVD and formatted it and then selected install from backup and used my time machine backup and it worked no problem!
 
-tWv-

-tWv-

macrumors 68000
May 11, 2009
1,583
2
Ohio
Yeah if you use Time Machine you don't have to clone the drive. I was talking about if you wanted to clone it and then make a direct swap without installing the OS again you would have to use an external enclosure.
 
Starhorsepax

Starhorsepax

macrumors member
Jun 6, 2010
75
4
I've got the same question..

If I want to upgrade my internal hard drive on a first gen macbook what do I need? Where do I find that info? I'm having a hard time keeping keeping enough free space with only a 74 gig drive.:confused:
 
A

aleXXXps

macrumors member
May 4, 2011
79
1
All I needed was a small phillips and a torx size 8 screwdriver, all of which came in a 4 dollar kit I bought from home depot.
 
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