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Upgrade Hard Drive in Macbook?

L

llee8820

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hi, my macbook currently has a 60gb hard drive. That is way to small for me, and was thinking of upgrading it to a larger one. The thing is though, that I have no idea where to look, or even know the specs needed for the macbook. Can anyone tell me a good place to look? Or recommend any hard drives themselves?
Thanks
 
Funnily enough, I’ve been thinking about this myself this afternoon. Great minds and all that. 😉

My cursory investigations tell me that you need to be looking at a SATA 2.5 hard drive – apparently it’s advisable to look at a 5,400 than a 7,200 due to potential heat issues with the faster drives in the MacBook.

As for where to look, I suppose that would depend on where you're based. It might be worthwhile having a bit of a browse online to see if there are any bargains to be had.
 
There are gobs of upgrades available. And at reasonable prices. You can talk to the more obvious avenues such as MacMall, CDW, NewEgg, etc etc etc not to mention the less well-known suppliers. And yes, you can go with the slower drive, which will save on heat build-up, not to mention you really won't see a serious lag in seek time, especially when you start to fill the drive.

More on drive seek times, etc in the new MBP thread here on pages 14ish-16ish. Explains it better than I can.
 
Right, Im planning on getting a 120Gb Seagate drive for my Macbook. Only question I have though is... how do I get the information off my HDD onto the new one without having to put it all onto another computer first?
 
Do you have an external FireWire hard drive? If so, then you could maybe look at an app like Super Duper to help you transfer all your precious data.

Basically, you'd clone your info onto the external drive, put your new drive into your MacBook, install the OS on it, and then transfer your data onto the MacBook from the external drive.
 
nope, no external... ive read about putting my macbook hdd into an enclosure and doing it that way... i need proper instructions though. never done it before. thanks🙂
 
I installed a new HD in my MacBook just recently, and the way I did it was to pop the new one into a cheap USB enclosure (though you can get a nice FireWire/USB one if you plan on continuing to use it as an external, which is a good idea), then using Carbon Copy Cloner (google it, it's free) to transfer the contents of the old disk onto the new one, bootable and with permissions intact. Then you just swap the drives out, which takes all of two minutes in the MacBook (if you need those instructions, check Apple's site, it's pretty clear), and you'll boot right back up to the same pretty screen you had before. BTW, it's advisable, just to be safe, to go ahead and repair permissions after doing something like that, just in case, but they turned out not to need it on mine.

jW
 
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