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Upgrading a MBP HDD - Three Questions

S

steiney

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 6, 2009
504
36
Hello All,

I'm up grading the HDD on my MBP 2.33 Core 2 Duo. I have three questions.

1. Will a 1 TB drive work with my May 2007 Motherboard? That may seem like a crazy question, but in light of the fact that 3-4 GB is the RAM limit on my model, I thought I might ask.

2. I'm most likely going to buy from OWC. Does anyone have a strong preference between Toshiba, Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi?

3. Does anyone know of a particularly amazing drive? Money is no object. I didn't anything faster than 7200 RPM, 16 MB cache. I would like a 10,000 RPM. Maybe more cache.

Thank you in advance!

steiney
 
steiney said:
Hello All,

I'm up grading the HDD on my MBP 2.33 Core 2 Duo. I have three questions.

1. Will a 1 TB drive work with my May 2007 Motherboard? That may seem like a crazy question, but in light of the fact that 3-4 GB is the RAM limit on my model, I thought I might ask.

2. I'm most likely going to buy from OWC. Does anyone have a strong preference between Toshiba, Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi?

3. Does anyone know of a particularly amazing drive? Money is no object. I didn't anything faster than 7200 RPM, 16 MB cache. I would like a 10,000 RPM. Maybe more cache.

Thank you in advance!

steiney
Click to expand...
Sounds like you're looking for SSD performance.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce/Solid_State_Pro
If money is no object the SSD is the way to go.
 
Wattser93: True. I guess I was being a little exaggerative. I could spend up to $300 on a really fast, large HDD. To get the space I need with an SSD, it's around $1500. Maybe less for a less quality drive than the one you quoted in you're reply, but still more than I am willing to spend.

Do you know of a really nice HDD? Thanks!
 
From my experiences with a 2006 MBP you should have no issue with a 1TB hard drive. I would suggest you take a look at some of the guides on how to replace a hard drive in a early MBP, because it is not what I would call easy.
 
Yeah, I've checked out a few guides. I think I can handle it. Thanks.
 
I personally like Western Digital the most with Seagate coming in last out of all of those drives. This is based on experience at work as an Apple Tech, It seems like we are always replacing Seagate drives.
 
Since you have such a large budget, I would recommend a 1TB WD Scorpio blue combined with a 128GB Vertex2 SSD in an optibay. I have a similar setup in my machine and can't recommend it enough.
 
Reelknead1: Thanks. I'll definitely take your advice as an Apple Tech!

I've had several great experiences LaCie and one bad experience with Maxtor. Unfortunately, LaCie doesn't make internal HDD's.

sbddude: The Scorpio blue only spins at 5400 RPM. I am looking for 7200 minimum. Also, are you talking about removing the optical drive and mounting an SSD in it's place?
 
Also, you may want to look at newegg.com or tigerdirect.com to see what type of deals/prices they have compared to OWC
 
sbddude said:
Since you have such a large budget, I would recommend a 1TB WD Scorpio blue combined with a 128GB Vertex2 SSD in an optibay. I have a similar setup in my machine and can't recommend it enough.
Click to expand...

I concur, I have a 128ssd and use an external for my storage but for someone who wants storage on the go, SSD and Optibay is the way to go. You can't beat the speed of an SSD. It doesn't matter how fast the conventional drives say they are, they can't come close to touching the SSDs in random functions, like opening an application.
 
scorpio blue
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136545&Tpk=scorpio blue 1tb

vertex 2
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0227590&cm_re=vertex_2-_-20-227-590-_-Product

optibay
http://cgi.ebay.com/2nd-HDD-caddy-A...C_Drives_Storage_Internal&hash=item3cad15a114

Correction to my above post -- put the SSD in the regular hard drive location and 1TB drive in the optibay. Due to the PATA to SATA conversion there will be some performance hit and you don't want that to inhibit the SSD.

If you want the fastest performing rotational drive, I recommend the Seagate Momentus XT, which is a SSD/HDD hybrid:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...2148591&cm_re=momentus-_-22-148-591-_-Product

It only comes in 500GB though.
 
sbddude: That optibay is pretty sick. I don't know if I want to give up my optical drive, but it would be pretty sweet to have a 1TB+.

That hybrid drive looks a lot more practical. That's not a bad deal for 500 GB's.

Reelknead1: If I'm gonna get an SSD as a standalone primary HDD, I'm gonna have to wait a year or so until the prices come down on the storage size I'm looking for.
 
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