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2007 MBP Hard Drive Upgrade Question

callmemike20

callmemike20

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 21, 2007
856
11
USA
I have a June 2007 MacBook Pro with a 160gb hard drive (thanking God that I upgraded from a 120gb). However, now that I use both windows and mac, I want to have more hard drive space. I was wondering if anyone could tell me if I need to look for a specific hard drive (or recommend one to me). I'm looking for maybe 250gb, 320gb, or 500gb.

Also, could I have the geek squad or genius bar do this for me?
 
Yes that would work. Anything that is 2.5" will work. I suggest either the Momentus XT drive or a WD 7200 RPM drive. Just know you are going to have to format the harddrive and change the mapping! I suggest using a external HDD enclosure!
 
TrojanX said:
Yes that would work. Anything that is 2.5" will work. I suggest either the Momentus XT drive or a WD 7200 RPM drive. Just know you are going to have to format the harddrive and change the mapping! I suggest using a external HDD enclosure!
Click to expand...

Wait, what? So I won't be able to simply pop in the hard drive and insert my Snow Leopard CD?
 
callmemike20 said:
Wait, what? So I won't be able to simply pop in the hard drive and insert my Snow Leopard CD?
Click to expand...
Well.....is maybe an appropriate response?? I think you can now if my sleep-craved mind serves me well. I think my previous post my be erroneous. I would do a quick search through the forums to be sure! I will try and do that for you.
 
TrojanX said:
Well.....is maybe an appropriate response?? I think you can now if my sleep-craved mind serves me well. I think my previous post my be erroneous. I would do a quick search through the forums to be sure! I will try and do that for you.
Click to expand...

I don't want to seem lazy, so I just want to let you know that I did try Mroogle before posting. I just couldn't find anything specific to my machine.
 
callmemike20 said:
I don't want to seem lazy, so I just want to let you know that I did try Mroogle before posting. I just couldn't find anything specific to my machine.
Click to expand...

I did a MRoogle and found nothing pertainant although I know there are 100000 threads on this and I have personally read them. I just get a bit hazzy with externals (pretty much have to format most of them unless there in FAT32) and regular HDD

This is what Mac rumors has to say

"A new hard drive has to be formatted (initialized, or Erased) with Disk Utility before it will appear on the desktop. The usual choice of formatting is "Macintosh Extended (HFS+)", although if a drive will be used interchangeably for Bootcamp and Mac, it might be formatted "MS-DOS (FAT32)". A drive can be Partitioned at this time, allowing for two or more separate Volumes, which can be formatted, named and mounted separately. Formatting or Partitioning a drive will destroy any data on that drive."

But it is a little unclear whether it is talking about Externals or HDD. Here is the link: http://guides.macrumors.com/Hard_Drive
 
TrojanX said:
I did a MRoogle and found nothing pertainant although I know there are 100000 threads on this and I have personally read them. I just get a bit hazzy with externals (pretty much have to format most of them unless there in FAT32) and regular HDD

This is what Mac rumors has to say

"A new hard drive has to be formatted (initialized, or Erased) with Disk Utility before it will appear on the desktop. The usual choice of formatting is "Macintosh Extended (HFS+)", although if a drive will be used interchangeably for Bootcamp and Mac, it might be formatted "MS-DOS (FAT32)". A drive can be Partitioned at this time, allowing for two or more separate Volumes, which can be formatted, named and mounted separately. Formatting or Partitioning a drive will destroy any data on that drive."

But it is a little unclear whether it is talking about Externals or HDD. Here is the link: http://guides.macrumors.com/Hard_Drive
Click to expand...

Hmm. Interesting...

I currently have a 160gb hard drive, and I use it with bootcamp, so I do this breakdown:

50gb Mac OS X Journaled

50gb FAT 32 (for use of media between mac and windows)

60gb Windows 7

I want to double it, so I may consider just going and buying a new hard drive and trying to do it myself.
 
I'm thinking about just going to buy the hard drive some time this week and just attempt to install it myself.

Is there much to worry about when opening up my macbook pro? I'm worried about the cable that is glued on the hard drive and the plastic edge around the keyboard cover. Anyone have any experience with these?
 
I just did this last week with a Hitachi 500gb 7200rpm drive on my early 2008 MBP. Make sure you have the appropriate screwdrivers on hand (Torx T6 I believe?) and an organized place for all of the little screws (I taped to a piece of paper and labeled).

I bought a cheap external case along with the drive. I formatted new drive and then cloned my old drive onto the new drive via external case. I partitioned it for bootcamp after I installed the drive.

It takes a little time and patience, but not hard at all.

Hope that helps:cool:
 
I did this with a Seagate Momentus 500gb drive from TigerDirect the other day.

Make sure you have the appropriate tools. This kit is good if you work with lots of other electronics as well: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/TOOLKIT11/

The cable IS glued to the hard drive, and it is a pain in the ass. Maybe I just got unlucky, but no guide I read properly expressed what a pain it would be to remove the cable carefully.

I used post–its to organize the screws as I took them out. I had a list of 17 steps, and the screws removed in a particular step were numbered accordingly, with about 3 steps per note. It made reversing the process very quick.

I cloned my old drive to the new one using Carbon Copy Cloner. You'll need an external case or a SATA to USB cable to do this, however.
 
Quick TIP ... you can make 1:1 clones of the OS X part using Carbon Copy... you can also achieve something similar for your boot camp partition using WinClone.

:)

No More long reinstalls .. just image then reinstall also if you need to "grow" the partition
 
TrojanX said:
Yes that would work. Anything that is 2.5" will work. I suggest either the Momentus XT drive or a WD 7200 RPM drive. Just know you are going to have to format the harddrive and change the mapping! I suggest using a external HDD enclosure!
Click to expand...

I remember reading the academic research paper on hybrid drives a couple of years back. As I recall the break even point was around 10%, but I guess few system these days have more the 4GB main memory, so reducing this probably is more cost effective.

What amazes me is I can get the 500Gb drive for 130 euros. Defiantly plan to upgrade.

J
 
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