External drive or conversion kit?

[waltervt]

Hi everybody and thank you for reading!

I bought a brand new MacBook Pro 5,5 (13,3", 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD) from an iStore on December 2009. It was a Xmas present from me to myself. I use it mainly for music-video recording and editing, also have music and movies and other stuff, so I need the space. I'm not much of a gamer, but I do play some Diablo or Halo occasionally.

I wanted to swap the HDD for a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT and use my current drive as an external in a FW800 enclosure, I wanted the Momentus because of it's 4GB NAND and 32MB cache. I had found the perfect combination at OWC, but being the case that I'm in Valencia-Spain and OWC ships from the USA, shipping everything got very expensive, at least out of my budget. I could get the drive here, but I can't find a decent FW800 enclosure that I like at an affordable price. So I'm thinking about going back to my very first option, even before I heard about the conversion kits at OWC, an external 1TB FW800 hard drive. I found two drives that I like, the Western Digital My Book Studio 1TB and the Iomega eGo Silver Desktop 2 1TB.

Now I don't know what to do, if to leave my MBP as it is and get an External Drive, which I'll be able to use now with my PC at work and in the future with my future computers as it has lots of space and store my stuff "outside my MBP" which I don't like that much (I'd like to keep everything together, I have the (maybe wrong) idea that plug in and search for what I want will be a pain in the ass and also take away the portability of a laptop); OR get a non-hybrid more-affordable drive and boost the performance of my MBP a little and take the risk of running out of space for backups one day and keep my stuff "inside my MBP".

I don't think that my MBP is slow or anything like that, I like it the way it is; but if it could be a lot faster would be good, right? I hope I haven't confused you.

Thank you for reading and I hope you can help me!

Cheers.

Walter

 

[heisenberg123]

Hi everybody and thank you for reading!

I bought a brand new MacBook Pro 5,5 (13,3", 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD) from an iStore on December 2009. It was a Xmas present from me to myself. I use it mainly for music-video recording and editing, also have music and movies and other stuff, so I need the space. I'm not much of a gamer, but I do play some Diablo or Halo occasionally.

I wanted to swap the HDD for a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT and use my current drive as an external in a FW800 enclosure, I wanted the Momentus because of it's 4GB NAND and 32MB cache. I had found the perfect combination at OWC, but being the case that I'm in Valencia-Spain and OWC ships from the USA, shipping everything got very expensive, at least out of my budget. I could get the drive here, but I can't find a decent FW800 enclosure that I like at an affordable price. So I'm thinking about going back to my very first option, even before I heard about the conversion kits at OWC, an external 1TB FW800 hard drive. I found two drives that I like, the Western Digital My Book Studio 1TB and the Iomega eGo Silver Desktop 2 1TB.

Now I don't know what to do, if to leave my MBP as it is and get an External Drive, which I'll be able to use now with my PC at work and in the future with my future computers as it has lots of space and store my stuff "outside my MBP" which I don't like that much (I'd like to keep everything together, I have the (maybe wrong) idea that plug in and search for what I want will be a pain in the ass and also take away the portability of a laptop); OR get a non-hybrid more-affordable drive and boost the performance of my MBP a little and take the risk of running out of space for backups one day and keep my stuff "inside my MBP".

I don't think that my MBP is slow or anything like that, I like it the way it is; but if it could be a lot faster would be good, right? I hope I haven't confused you.

Thank you for reading and I hope you can help me!

Cheers.

Walter

Didn't read it all because it's too long but you can get. 1tb external for less than 100$ I would do that over your old 250 GB in an enclosure

 

[tofast2belast]

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Upgrade-FireWire/dp/B003IT6PHC

you can use this, i too used the seagate momentus xt. i soon replaced it with an ssd drive though, but you can use this cable. data speeds are pretty nice...

the one thing about the momentus xt though is the sleep, if your using it as your primary drive, make sure to turn off put hard disk to sleep in power saver options in system preferences. otherwise upon wakeup it will take a while to resume or you might have to reboot.

 

[waltervt]

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Upgrade-FireWire/dp/B003IT6PHC

you can use this, i too used the seagate momentus xt. i soon replaced it with an ssd drive though, but you can use this cable. data speeds are pretty nice...

the one thing about the momentus xt though is the sleep, if your using it as your primary drive, make sure to turn off put hard disk to sleep in power saver options in system preferences. otherwise upon wakeup it will take a while to resume or you might have to reboot.

hey, thanks a lot for the tips! When you got the cable, where did you put the hard drive in? Would you recommend the XT or should I keep my current drive and get an external?

Thanks again

 

[tofast2belast]

hey, thanks a lot for the tips! When you got the cable, where did you put the hard drive in? Would you recommend the XT or should I keep my current drive and get an external?

Thanks again

mine is plugged in like the picture below, i dont have a case so i can just swap drives out once one fills up...

I got the XT to replace the HDD inside the Mac, what you see in the picture is the original Mac drive.
I have however replaced the XT with an SSD drive, but this was because I needed faster access to data, not because the drive did not perform as expected, it does.

I did get an error the first time trying to install os x on the drive, what i did was open disk utility from the os x install and format the drive with security option one pass zero, and did a restore from dvd to partition so i could install os x from an external hard drive.(speed is way faster this way than using the dvd) after this it installed fine.

would i recommend the drive? the answer is yes, it is considerably noticeable difference between the oem hard drive and the xt.

once you install os x(I say do a clean install, but you can clone the drive if you want) after the first boot you will notice boot times will be quicker, and each time after that. what its doing is loading items into that cache making it quicker to access information. same goes for applications, after the first run(open an application and quit then reopen you will see)

the OEM MacBook Pro hard drive is 5400 rpm unless you customized the build options, the xt runs at 7200rpm.

couple things to note:
Battery life will be reduced but not a significant amount, this may be due to the increase in rpm, or the fact you must uncheck the "turn off hard disks whenever possible"

the hard drive does make noise. not alot but you can hear it if your looking for it and some vibrations but not unbearable. its not like a game controller vibrating or cell phone, just a slight vibration.

the sound from the hard disk is more a clicking noise, and when you are accessing data contiguously you will hear a slight hum noise. the fan in the Mac is louder then the drive if the fan increases speed.