A question about upgrading my 13" MBP's hard drive

[ozziegn]

I just bought a 13: MBP and now I want to swap out the stock hard drive for a 7200rpm model.

what's the easiest way I can make a perfect clone of my current hard drive to my 7200rpm model? what program would you guys use?

 

[spinnerlys]

CarbonCopyClone for cloning your harddrive to an external USB enclosure that works with 2.5" SATA drives, where you can put in the new drive first for cloning, and the old drive as a backup or whatever.

 

[ozziegn]

^ very nice. thanks for the suggestion.

 

[entity]

For your hard drive, take a read here first. In a nutshell; the 5400RPM WD Scorpio Blue is nearly as fast as the 7200RPM Seagate Momentus. Cheaper, cooler, and fast -- it seems to be a win win.

As for backups, Time Machine is probably the easiest way to image a machine. Other favorites are Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper. Personally, I use Time Machine. Hope this helps!

 

[feedmeister]

If you already have an enclosure, I wouldn't do either of those things. Just plug in the new hdd, and use disk utilities with your leopard disk to import the mac on your old hdd. Much faster and less complicated. If you don't have any system files that are normally unchangeable changed, you shouldn't have any issues.

 

[ozziegn]

I just swapped everything over. I'm using a Toshiba 200GB 7200rpm hard drive and everything is okay.

funny thing though, my system doesn't really feel like it's any faster than the stock hard drive. this means the stock hard drive that came in mine must not be all that bad to begin with.

oh well. I've already swapped everything over so I'll leave the 7200rpm unit in there for now.

 

[ozziegn]

okay, this is weird. I installed the 7200rpm hard drive and my start up times went from like 35 seconds to something like 70 seconds. this didn't seem right so I rebooted a couple times and still no better.

I reinstalled my factory hard drive and now I'm back at 35 second boot times. what's up with that? my 7200rpm hard drive is slower than my 5400rpm unit?

either that or something didn't agree when I cloned the two hard drives. oh well, back to using the stock hard drive.

 

[spinnerlys]

You could try AJA System Test and benchmark both drives' read and write speeds.

But it will be more likely that the cloning went a little bit haywire.

Have you repaired permissions on the new drive yet?