Advice on hard drive and memory upgrade would be appreciated

[02browncraig]

Hi everyone,

Basically my brother's birthday is coming up and he wants a few upgrades for his MacBook Pro (Spring 2010) mainly being a new hard drive of preferably 1TB and I thought I'd maybe try and get a memory upgrade aswell.

According to the Apple website (http://store.apple.com/uk/memorymodel/ME_13_24_MBP_IC2DUO) you can get 8GB of memory into this laptop however I've read on other sites that the max is 4GB so im hoping someone could clear this up for me.

About the hard drive as I said earlier I'm looking at 1TB capacity which rules out SSD which is too expensive for me anyway. I have found these websites with some available:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/
http://www.ebuyer.com/search?page=1&sort=popularity&limit=10&store=33&cat=392&filterca76=1000

But the problem is I just don't know which to choose as I'm not sure exactly what I should be looking for. Is higher RPM or higher MB cache better? Also am I right in thinking all 3.5" hard drives would fit ok?

Some of the stats of his current laptop which I know are:
MacBook Pro (Spring 2010)
13-inch with 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory - 4gb 1067 MHz DDR3
Hard drive - 250gb SATA Disk

Sorry for the long essay and thank you very much to anyone that helps.

 

[miles01110]

But the problem is I just don't know which to choose as I'm not sure exactly what I should be looking for. Is higher RPM or higher MB cache better? Also am I right in thinking all 3.5" hard drives would fit ok?

8 GB will be fine, but 3.5" hard drives will not. You need a 2.5" drive.

 

[The-Pro]

8GB will most definitely work.
3.5" HDD's are for desktops, they wont work in a MBP.
If your brother does not use his CD drive you could put a HDD caddy in there and pop a small SSD in for the Operating system and a HDD for the data.

 

[02browncraig]

Thank you miles01110 and The-Pro for your replies they were very helpful. I'm glad I hadn't already bought the hard drive otherwise getting the wrong size would have been rather embarrassing.

I am now looking at getting these -
http://www.dabs.com/products/corsai...-cl7-7J6C.html?refs=384730000-468550000&src=2

http://www.dabs.com/products/samsun...WF.html?refs=41580000-56330000-52780000&src=3

That sounds like a great idea The-Pro but for now I think I'll just get the hard drive and tell my brother about that idea.

 

[The-Pro]

Excellent HDD and the correct RAM. Your all set.

HDD caddy's for the optical bay cost like 10 pounds, SSD for like 60, you only need a small one.

 

[mgipe]

Consider a Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB hybrid SSD/HDD for a jump in performance.

 

[Crzyrio]

Consider a Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB hybrid SSD/HDD for a jump in performance.

I actually have one and after a while the difference is barely noticeable, especially when the firmware automatically decides what goes on the 4GB partition.

If anything, take your CD Drive out and put a SSD in