2008 Unibody upgrades

[bbyf16]

Hi there, thought I'd ask you guys for a bit of help/advice. I have a 2008 unibody 2.8ghz. I thought of doing a few upgrades so that I could stretch another year or two out of it before it gets long in the tooth. Currently, I have 8gb of ram so I don't need to upgrade that bit. I've done what I think to be a bit of research but would like a bit of clarification regarding a few things.

I currently have a seagate 500gb momentus hybrid drive that I plan to replace. I do like the hybrid idea and I feel it to be faster in my day to day activities (whether its in my head or not, I don't know). My optical drive has died again (3rd time now, well known issue), and since i'm out of applecare and amex coverage, I'm just going to get rid of the damn thing (I hardly use it anymore anyway). I've been told that theres no point in spending the extra money for optibay or data doubler so I was planning on getting : http://www.ebay.com/itm/2nd-HDD-SDD-hard-drive-caddy-Apple-MacBook-Pro-Unibody-/280707167107?pt=US_Drive_Bay_Caddies&hash=item415b737383 .

I was planning on getting a SSD and a regular 1tb hard drive.

Questions:
1. Should I bother getting a SSD drive? (I hear conflicting reports on actual reliability and performance gains, 1 year after install)
2. If I do get the SSD, where do I put it? Since I have the nvidia chipset, there seems to be a sata problem on speed.
3. Which brand would you recommend? I hear sandisk extreme is decent but somewhat troublesome, samsung is amazing for speed but firmware upgrades need windows. Intel 320 is way too expensive to consider. Should I rather get two regular hard drives?
4. Which regular hard drive would you guys recommend considering my chipset problems? I remember buying a toshiba 1tb (the hard drive before my seagate) and that gave me beachball after beachball. I would like something that is known to be compatible with my machine.
5. OWC has a hgst travelstar 1tb that they've formatted to be compatible with nvidia macs. The 3 year warranty however, is through OWC and not through hitachi anymore. Should I consider it? http://eshop.macsales.com/item/HGST/0J22413S2/


PS: I do expect my fans to fail soon enough (they usually do at 5 years), should I cough up the $60 and buy from powerbookmedic or just ebay it again (seems to be OEM) http://www.ebay.com/itm/OEM-Apple-661-4951-15-MacBook-Pro-Unibody-Right-Fan-15-Late-2008-Mid-2009-/180905297162?pt=US_CPU_Fans_Heatsinks&hash=item2a1ecbc50a

Same question goes for the speakers, since mine have started to blare when playing music. I know I've asked a lot of questions, hope you can help. Thanks!

 

[brop52]

If money is no object then get the biggest capacity you can and put it in the HDD bay. Samsung and Crucial would be good. Put your regular HDD in the optibay (where the optical drive is). The Seagate Momentus XT is a good drive (have it now).

As for the HDD to get, get one with good ratings on Newegg. It doesn't really matter. Get a 7200 RPM HDD and get the capacity you need. Since you will have a SSD why worry that much about it?

Why replace fans before they go bad?

Turn down your music.

 

[bbyf16]

money is also a factor, I don't want to spend more than $250 total. I wish I could just put any hard drive into the optibay but considering I have one of the special laptops with the nvidia mcp79 chipset (neg 1.5 link speed), its not that easy. I've tried putting in a toshiba 1tb and a wd blue drive as well, both gave me beachballs. So like most 2008/2009 owners, I'm going based on actual user experience.

I'm not replacing the fans, rather, I'm keeping them on hand to replace when they do go bad. The reason for this is that I'm stationed abroad for most of the year (48-50 weeks of the year) and its difficult to get spares when you're in some remote area.

I need to replace the speaker because its blaring, not because of high volume but because I think the subwoofer is bust (right speaker is the one with the subwoofer right?). The reason I think this is, regardless of the volume I put it at, some tracks will just sound very noisy, but they sound fine if I use an aux cable out.

Right now, I'm looking at the 1tb momentus xt which, according to seagate tech support, should automatically adjust to sata 1.5 speeds and if not, can be manually adjusted with jumper settings.

 

[jafingi]

I've upgraded mine to 4GB RAM and a 80GB Intel 320 SSD. Running GREAT with Mountain Lion.