BlackBook HD Upgrade

Who says Macs don't last? No one I know, certainly- the only Mac I've ever had die outright on me was the 2007 MBP with the faulty nVidia GPU, but that's another story...

As far as I know hard drives in the 2.5" form factor are not readily available over 1TB. Another issue is that drives that large usually come in 5400RPM speed, which I would not wish on my worst enemy.

However, SATA I and II (1.5GBPS/3GBPS) are fully cross-compatible, with the caveat that the drive will operate at SATA I speeds when connected to a SATA I controller. The jumpers were really only used in very early SATA-II drives (and then only on desktop drives to my knowledge)- the speed is automatically selected on modern drives.

I am not 100% that a SATA-III drive would work with a SATA-I connection, as I have yet to try it, but since II and III are cross-compatible I would imagine the same to be true for I and III. The connectors are unchanged over the last 10 years.

SATA is back and forwards compatible unless the mac is PowerPC, which yours is not.

You might consider a ssd....I put a older 64g one I had to just try out (now back out as sold) it's unreal the difference it makes! Your macbook will feel like a macbook pro! Not only boot times,but also apps just explode onto the screen.

I would second the phenomenal improvement seen with an SSD. If you really need the capacity I would consider getting rid of the DVD drive and having an SSD and a hard drive.

The SATA II will work, it will just be throttled down to SATA I speed.

I also put a 64GB SSD in my 2007 MacBook just to see the difference. Startup, Shutdown, and application launching are EXTREMELY faster.

Using IDEs for software development is also much faster.

Web browsing isn't faster, but it isn't slower.

Also, since that machine is limited to 3GB of ram, it should help when the machine starts to use SWAP space.