My macbook pro (2010) has hard drive failure and I was looking at getting a replacement drive for it. I was wondering, if I purchase a toshiba hard drive (1tb) would this reduce my battery life? I was using the original Hitachi drive before (500gb)
go with an ssd, it's worth having a smaller ssd and an external hd for the performance increase it brings.
Also that model is notorious for problems with the SATA cable it might be worth putting your HD in an external enclosure and seeing if it'll boot from that. If it does it's possibly just a $20 cable to fix.