Questions on H/D upgrade Late 2008 Alum.

[Canonman]

Greetings all,

A couple of questions regarding the upgrade of a hard drive.

I have a Late 2008, 13 inch, aluminum, 2.4GHz. I want to upgrade the hard dive and purchase a 1Tb drive. There are two models I am considering, one is a regular 1Tb 7200rpm, the other is a 1TB hybrid drive which is 5400rpm but has some kind of small, shared solid state drive. Both can be found here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0097LG9U8/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER


http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Solid...0LM014/dp/B00B99JUBQ/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

So my questions:

1. Can I do a complete reinstall from the original floppy disc and jump to Maverics or do I have to go through each operating system upgrade? What are my options?

2. Both of the listed drives have many excellent reviews and the price difference is not significant. That being said, I have noticed from some reviews that the Hybrid drive seems to be faster only with the operating system and booting programs. Does anyone have experience with both of these drive and care to give some guidance?

90% of the computer usage is Lightroom and Photoshop with NIK and Topaz filters that I use on a separate monitor.

Thanks

 

[MCAsan]

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5842


If you Mac complies, use your App Store account to download and install Mavericks.

Personally I don't like hybrid drives as they do not have similar read and write speeds. When I refurb 2010 MacBooks, I put in Samsung SSDs and 8 GB of memory.

 

[westrock2000]

Just something to keep in mind is that the Seagate Momentus XT SSHD drives can be hit or miss in Apple computers. I have a 750GB model that worked fine on Mac Pro. But when i tried to use it in a Fusion Drive on my Mini, the computer became very unstable. There is also lots of info on the internet about 2009-2011 MacBooks using these drives.

Not saying it won't work, and it's a decent drive for the price. But something to keep in mind.

 

[cm0ski]

I'm honestly not a huge fan of hybrid drives as I have seen quite a few fail, so I would recommend the 7200 RPM drive. Take into consideration that the more cache a hard drive has, the faster you will be able to access data. (It is like the halfway between the magnetic plate of the hard drive and the RAM).

You can either create a USB installer (tons of great guides on Google) or install Snow Leopard from DVD, update it to 10.6.8 and then proceed to upgrade to Mavericks.

 

[jovi.jia]

My macbook 2008, 13 inch, aluminum, 2.0GHz, upgraded with a Sumsung 840 evo 120G (DVD position) & 8G memory 1333hz, works much faster than original 5400rpm HD, which also on work as before. So I think this is a scheme for you too.