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1tb hard drive replacement and time machine

S

sunshadow

macrumors member
Original poster
May 27, 2010
40
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I bought my Macbook Pro in July of last year. It's the standard 13" model. I promptly replaced the hard drive with a 640gb one. I'm not too terribly happy with the performance of this drive, so in a couple months I'd like to upgrade to a 1tb drive. I'll settle for another 640 or a 750 but if I'm gonna replace it I might as well put in a bigger drive. Any suggestions as to brands/models?

Also, how would I go about transferring everything to the new drive? Do I just get an external case for the current one and use the time machine program? When I replaced the hard drive the first time I did it literally a week after I got the computer, so I just started fresh. I don't want to have to worry about installing everything again though.

Also, I've got a windows bootcamp partition on this computer. I don't want that copied over to the new drive, so I hope the time machine won't copy that over. I need more than 32 gigs of space, so I'm just going to allocate a larger bootcamp partition and make it NTFS. I'm using Macdrive anyway so really I'm storing all my files on the mac partition. I've just run out of room to install software.

Thanks for any advice.
 
I use an application called Super Duper for just such situations. It will make an exact copy of your computer's hard drive. Get an external enclosure and put the new drive in it, format it, and let Super Duper do all the work. When its done just switch out the old drive.

And as for the boot camp partition, why don't you just use disk utility to allocate more space to that partition?

Another thought, if you do go this route. Might want to put the old drive into the enclosure before.the swap as Windows doesn't like people trying to install it on an external.

Edit: the seagate momentus 7200 rpm hard drives are very good.
 
Won't the 7200rpm drives eat at the battery life?

I've cloned a disc before, but if Time Machine can copy everything over for me, I won't need to bother. I just don't really know if it works like that.

FAT32 partitions can't be larger than 32gb.
 
sunshadow said:
Won't the 7200rpm drives eat at the battery life?

I've cloned a disc before, but if Time Machine can copy everything over for me, I won't need to bother. I just don't really know if it works like that.

FAT32 partitions can't be larger than 32gb.
Click to expand...

Oh right. Hadn't thought about the FAT32 limitation. And no, the momentus drives are easy on the battery. And yes, you can easily install the OS on a clean drive and use time machine with it.
 
Umm, FAT32 can go well past 32gb for partition size. Only problem is that once it passes 32gb the cluster size jumps from 16k to 32k therefore "wasting" space on the drive if it's a lot of smaller files.

Where you might be getting the false impression that it's 32gb is that's all Win2000 and XP would format to, but it's not a limitation of the format. Both would read partitions larger, just not format them.

From the XP Resource Kit:
The 127.5-GB limit on FAT32 volumes imposed in Windows 98 no longer applies to Windows Me. In Windows Me, using a cluster size of 32 KB, a FAT32 volume can theoretically be about 8 terabytes. However, the 32-bit fields in the partition table (and in the FAT32 boot sector) limit the size of an individual volume (regardless of file system) on a basic MBR disk using a sector size of 512 bytes to approximately 2 terabytes."

"Although Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional can mount FAT32 volumes of any size, Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional can format FAT32 volumes up to 32 GB only. Use NTFS to format larger volumes. For more information about the benefits of formatting Windows XP Professional volumes by using NTFS, see 'Advantages of Using NTFS' earlier in this chapter."
 
FAT32 (File Allocation Table)
  • Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
  • Maximum file size: 4GB.
  • Maximum volume size: 2TB
NTFS (Windows NT File System)
  • Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
  • Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
  • To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X: Install NTFS-3G for Mac OS X (free)
  • Some have reported problems using Tuxera (approx 33USD).
  • Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard, but is not advisable, due to instability.
  • AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support NTFS
  • Maximum file size: 16 TB
  • Maximum volume size: 256TB
HFS+ (Hierarchical File System, a.k.a. Mac OS Extended)
  • Read/Write HFS+ from native Mac OS X
  • Required for Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner backups of Mac internal hard drive.
  • To Read/Write HFS+ from Windows, Install MacDrive
  • To Read HFS+ (but not Write) from Windows, Install HFSExplorer
  • Maximum file size: 8EiB
  • Maximum volume size: 8EiB
exFAT (FAT64)
  • Supported in Mac OS X only in 10.6.5 or later.
  • exFAT partitions created with OS X 10.6.5 are inaccessible from Windows 7
  • Not all Windows versions support exFAT. See disadvantages.
  • exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table)
  • AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support exFAT
  • Maximum file size: 16 EiB
  • Maximum volume size: 64 ZiB
 
bozz2006 said:
I use an application called Super Duper for just such situations. It will make an exact copy of your computer's hard drive. Get an external enclosure and put the new drive in it, format it, and let Super Duper do all the work. When its done just switch out the old drive.
Click to expand...

x2 for Super Duper

As for the drive, I would suggest waiting till the new firmware update hits the momentus XT in a month or two if you are looking for more performance. Otherwise, I would search for a drive with the highest cache possible in your price range. Maybe a samsung spinpoint?
 
So I can theoretically have a different tool expand the size of my windows FAT32 partition? Does it reorganize the whole partition with 32kb clusters? If the hd is large enough then I don't really have to worry about wasting space on a bunch of 10kb files. But at the same time I have run into issues w/ the 4gb file limit (which I forgot about until you mentioned it) on some externals formatted with FAT32. So I'm thinking once I install the new drive, I just give bootcamp a larger partition and make it NTFS. As long as macdrive still works I don't need to read the windows partition from inside MacOS (though I know there are tools to do that).

I can wait a couple of months to install a new drive so I'll keep a look out for the Momentus XTs with updated firmware.
 
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