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mdhansen5

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 22, 2010
43
0
Colorado
have the 13" 2.4 GHz base 2010 MacBook pro and I'm looking to do some upgrades on it.

One of these is upgrading the hard drive. The current drive that I'm looking at is a SATA II Hitachi Travelstar 500GB, but I'm still wondering if my laptop will fully support it.

This is the drive if you want to check it out:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0029LHVLO/ref=ord_cart_shr?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&tag=ifixit-20

It also runs at 3 Gb/s which I think is the same as the current 250GB standard Apple drive that I have right now.

Will a SATA II drive work fine, or will I end up running into trouble with speed or other problems?

Thanks a bunch!
 

Darien Red Sox

macrumors regular
Dec 13, 2010
216
7
CT, USA
Should not be a problem, I installed a WD 500GB SATA2 drive in my sisters mid 2009 13" MBP and it has not had any problems with the drive.
 

paulbeattie87

macrumors regular
Aug 17, 2008
108
4
North East Scotland
You might want to watch for the power management in OS X, it can cause high cycle count on non Apple hard drives. Apple pre-load their hard drives with firmware that makes them work nicely with the power management. Third party drives don't have this so cycle a lot, it may also freeze from time to time due to this cycling.
 

mdhansen5

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 22, 2010
43
0
Colorado
You might want to watch for the power management in OS X, it can cause high cycle count on non Apple hard drives. Apple pre-load their hard drives with firmware that makes them work nicely with the power management. Third party drives don't have this so cycle a lot, it may also freeze from time to time due to this cycling.

Sorry, I'm kind of confused about this. What does this mean? And is there a way to fix it if I encounter some problem?
 
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