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Best Internal HDD Replacement

P

parkm13

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 25, 2010
224
5
I have an early 2011 macbook pro, and I am looking into buying a new, faster hard drive. I need at least 500gb so an SSD is out of the question. What is the best one I can buy?
 
parkm13 said:
I have an early 2011 macbook pro, and I am looking into buying a new, faster hard drive. I need at least 500gb so an SSD is out of the question. What is the best one I can buy?
Click to expand...

I'd go for a hybrid drive, something like this. You get the benefits of lots of storage, and the speed of an SSD with specific situations.

A Crucial M4 512GB is around $400 these days. Still quite a bit of money.

*EDIT* Looks like appletechpro beat me to the submission :p
 
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I have looked into the hybrid drives and have found mixed reviews. Would that be reliable enough?
 
I have no experience with a hybrid drive, so for a 2'5 hdd I would a recommend a western digital scorpio 750 gb. u can buy then for around 100 dollars.
Cheap and reliable.
 
I recently scored a 2 month old 17" late 2011 sandy bridge macbook pro. OMG, LOVE that glossy samsung screen! Poor guy had a money crunch, and felt a bit bad for him, despite paying his asking price. If he didn't have the box and was willing to sign a bill of sale, I'd almost be suspicious! Did buy him a cup of coffee, though.

It's the stock 2.4 i7 configuration with 4 gigs of ram and a 750 gb 5400 rpm (Ugh! Why the hell does apple still use those things in 2K+ computers? To save 5 bucks?!?) but still has extended applecare.

I'm itching a bit to put the seagate hybrid drive and 16 gigs of ram in this puppy (less than $250 total on newegg with corsair memory) but I'm tempted to wait it out for another six months and see if SSD prices continue to fall. I'm figuring I might as well only open the case once and do it all at the same time.

Any insight or opinions?
 
Could someone elaborate how these hybrid drives work?

Do they have a small partition that is SSD to store the OS?
 
Before I upgraded to an SSD, I had a Seagate Momentus Xt and it treated me well.
Its not an SSD by it gives SSD like experiences Like fast app launching for any app you use frequently and it boots rather quickly.

In Fact, while im impressed with the SSD speeds, coming from an Momentus XT Hybrid drive kinda make made it seem less dramatic as people switching from a 5400rpm drive.

I had no issues with the XT and have it in an enclosure now that is still bootable just in case I have an issue with the SSD.
 
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