New MBP owner with upgrade questions

[trophynuts]

Hello i'm new to Mac and this site. I bought my first MBP this weekend.

the 13 inch with the i5 2.3 processor. I have some questions about upgrades.

1. I'm definitely upgrading to 8gb of ram. Has anyone used the ram from Crucial? Any issues?

2. I was thinking of upgrading the HD to a 7200rpm one. My question is would i really see a noticeable increase in speed with that HD upgrade? Also would the faster speed have an adverse affect on my batt life? SSD's are still out of my price range for now.

Thanks in advance for the help. Sorry for any newbness errors in my postings.

 

[benbrownlol]

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Curial Ram works as advertised but people at looking at the faster 1600mhz Kingston HyperX ram now, not sure of that works on the 13" though.

Get a 500gb Momentus XT and be happy!

 

[trophynuts]

ok thanks.


soooooo would i see a notice in speed of upgrading to the 7200rpm HD?

 

[rockinrocker]

ok thanks.


soooooo would i see a notice in speed of upgrading to the 7200rpm HD?

A slight one, yes.

For my money, it was worth it. HD's tend to be the bottleneck speed wise, so anything done to alleviate that is good.

Haven't really noticed any adverse effect on battery life. If you're concerned about it just check 'Put hard disc to sleep when possible' under Energy Saver.

 

[Mac-key]

I moved to a 7200rpm drive and really didn't notice any battery loss.

 

[benbrownlol]

ok thanks.


soooooo would i see a notice in speed of upgrading to the 7200rpm HD?

You would see a much larger difference with a Momentus XT hard drive, gives the speed of a 7200 with a small SSD cache so your boot times are alot faster and your most used apps will load quicker. IMO if you can't afford a SSD a Momentus XT is the best thing to get.

 

[4phun]

You would see a much larger difference with a Momentus XT hard drive, gives the speed of a 7200 with a small SSD cache so your boot times are alot faster and your most used apps will load quicker. IMO if you can't afford a SSD a Momentus XT is the best thing to get.

Momentus XT are proving to be failure prone junk. Google and Amazon are your friends here so do a search for disgruntled users.

I performed both upgrades on a new 2011 MBP using a WD 750GB drive and the same memory from Amazon. It was super easy with the RIGHT TOOLS. There are several online tutorial videos that walk you through each step before you get even get started so you know what to expect.


Google is you friend there to find those tutorial videos.

When swapping out the HD be safe and unplug the battery from the main board. You will need to immediately reset the RTC when you power it back up and boot to OS X. I dropped the HD in an external USB holder and cloned the internal stock HD using Super Cloner before I started this project.

I had to reinstall Win 7 Home Premium all over again as it was too hard to move when the reinstallation was simply faster since this was a new MBP with almost no windows files of significance on it.

 

[gmans46]

4 phun what upgrades did you exactly make. Im about to place a 750gb hdd in the optibay but leave my stock ssd alone i knew about unplugging the batter but how do you reset the rtc

 

[AlBDamned]

Momentus XT are proving to be failure prone junk. Google and Amazon are your friends here so do a search for disgruntled users.

From what I understand, the earlier firmware had issues, but the SD24 and SD25 Firmware have righted this drive. Mine has been running flawlessly, and quickly, for a while now.

To the OP, a large, 7200RPM drive would be a worthwhile upgrade. Another choice could be to go for a 40GB SSD for your main drive, and put your existing 320GB drive in the drive bay with the optibay mod.