Recommended hard drive MacBook Aluminium

[thebassmanmac]

Hi
I have a late 2008 Aluminium unibody MacBook, currently it has 4Mb Ram and 160Gb hard drive. Running Lion.
I am drastically running out of storage space, only got a few Gb left.

I have been looking at upgrading the hard disc to maybe a WD Scorpio Blue, 500Gb, 5400 Rpm etc or maybe the black version at 7200 Rpm.
I have read lots of reviews on these and people mention they can be noisier, hotter and more battery hungry than the Fujitsu Apple supplied drives.

Any opinions on whether to go for a WD or maybe pay the extra for the Fujitsu drives, or maybe any other recommendations???

cheers

thebassman

 

[flatfoot]

Go for a Seagate Momentus XT. Those have 4–8GB (depending on drive capacity) of SSD cache that's automatically filled with frequently used files.

This gives you the capacity of a mechanical drive with not to be sneezed at speed advantages at a reasonable price point.

 

[416049]

Hitachi drives are good as well but you cant go wrong with the western digital drives, had one for ages without any problems.

And 4mb of ram... time to upgrade

 

[Dweez]

My son has the same MBP (or very similar, MacBookPro4,1) and I put a 500 gig Momentus XT into it when the 160 gig drive start showing signs of impending death.

My only complaint is that the Momentus is a bit on the loud side. Not what I expected in a laptop drive, but it performs good enough so we just ignore it.

 

[thebassmanmac]

Thanks guys, i will have a look at the ones mentioned.

I did like the the look of the Seagate momentus, but the noise puts me off. I like the fact that my current Fujitsu drive in near silent and runs really cool.

cheers

thebassmanmac

 

[allapon]

Thanks guys, i will have a look at the ones mentioned.

I did like the the look of the Seagate momentus, but the noise puts me off. I like the fact that my current Fujitsu drive in near silent and runs really cool.

cheers

thebassmanmac

WDC Scorpio Black is the better choice, It is faster and quiet with around 50% performance upgrade.

If you prefer Silence, You can go with SSD Non Sandforce Chipset. Silence, Fast and also lighten your pocket!!

I just upgrade my Macbook Late 2008 with SSD in Optibay, I change my boot drive to be WD Scorpio Black since 2 years ago!

 

[davidg4781]

I put a WD Scorpio Black 7,200 750GB in my 2006 MacBook.

I noticed no decrease in battery life and the only thing I can hear are my fans. It's been a great hard drive. After using Seagate for 13 years I think I'm sticking with Western Digital.

 

[thebassmanmac]

Been looking into this a fair bit.
One thing i'm still a bit confused about;
I know this was originally shipped with a SATA1 (1.5Gbit/s) 5400 rpm hard drive and i have read that the SATA 2 & 3 drives are backwards compatible.

My question is, if i fitted a SATA 2 (3Gbit/s) or SATA 3 (6Gbit/s) drive would this macbook be able to fully utilise them, or would they be restricted to the SATA1 (1.5Gbit/s) speeds?

cheers

thebassmanmac

 

[flatfoot]

Been looking into this a fair bit.
One thing i'm still a bit confused about;
I know this was originally shipped with a SATA1 (1.5Gbit/s) 5400 rpm hard drive and i have read that the SATA 2 & 3 drives are backwards compatible.

My question is, if i fitted a SATA 2 (3Gbit/s) or SATA 3 (6Gbit/s) drive would this macbook be able to fully utilise them, or would they be restricted to the SATA1 (1.5Gbit/s) speeds?

cheers

thebassmanmac

Download Mactracker (freeware) and use it to find out whether your MacBook has a SATA I connection. If it does, any drive you connect to the port will be restricted to 1.5Gbit/s.

 

[allapon]

Been looking into this a fair bit.
One thing i'm still a bit confused about;
I know this was originally shipped with a SATA1 (1.5Gbit/s) 5400 rpm hard drive and i have read that the SATA 2 & 3 drives are backwards compatible.

My question is, if i fitted a SATA 2 (3Gbit/s) or SATA 3 (6Gbit/s) drive would this macbook be able to fully utilise them, or would they be restricted to the SATA1 (1.5Gbit/s) speeds?

cheers

thebassmanmac

Hard Drive from Apple run on SATA I. If you choose for WDC Scorpio Black, it will gain some ground on full capability of SATAII from Nvdia Chipset.

On the other hands, if you decide to go for SSD with SATA III, it will run only SATAII Speed. (For SSD, Don't choose "Sandforce" Chipset since it has some issue with Nvdia chipset. Go with Crucial M4 or another one with "Marvell" chipset instead.)

I run WDC Scorpio Black from Harddisk bay and Plextor M3 from Optibay both of them are SATA II Compatible.

 

[Medic278]

I would recommend either a true SSD, I recommend the Intel 520 series. I have a 240GB Intel 520 in my MBP and its awesome, the machine loads programs like photoshop almost instantly. However I also would recommend the Seagate Momentus XT, I looked into these drives before I bought my SSD and they get great reviews. Plus they are a Hybrid HDD so it has a small SSD cache to store frequently used programs on so you get the best of both worlds, you get the performance of an SSD for common tasks and the space of an HDD so you really don't have to sacrifice anything.