Replacing Hard Drive and Packaging Questions

[rekhyt]

Hi, I'm thinking about replacing my hard drive on my MacBook Pro. I have done the process of replacing the hard drive before on a Mac, albeit on a MacBook instead of a Pro.

Which hard drive should I get and from what brand (Aiming for around 320GB or 500GB), and what sort of packaging should I expect it to come in?

Last time I bought a hard drive it came in a plastic wrapper like this. No idea if it was used or what-

Thanks in advance,
Rekhyt

 

[GoCubsGo]

Computer components should come in anti-static bags like the one you have pictured.
Look for a Western Digital or Samsung 2.5" drive, search the boards for more info.

Which hard drive for MB and MBP

 

[MacDawg]

Everyone has their own opinion about brands, size, speed, etc. based on their own personal experiences

I personally recommend the Western Digitals
But your mileage may vary

Just remember, all HDDs fail
Some sooner than later

 

[rekhyt]

Computer components should come in anti-static bags like the one you have pictured.
Look for a Western Digital or Samsung 2.5" drive, search the boards for more info.

Which hard drive for MB and MBP

Alright, thanks for the link.

Isn't it slightly worrying though for the hard drive to come in such a small and unprotected bag? It could be damaged in shipping or exposed to magnetic objects along the way and fail earlier.

Everyone has their own opinion about brands, size, speed, etc. based on their own personal experiences

I personally recommend the Western Digitals
But your mileage may vary

Which hard drive from Western Digital would be one that you would personally suggest?

 

[Makosuke]

Retail laptop drives will usually come in a pretty shelf-ready box, and also a much higher price tag. "Bulk" drives, which you presumably bought before, almost always come in an anti-static bag like that, usually in a specially padded mailing carton of some kind. They're not used, that's just how they ship.

Everyone has a different opinion on the best drive, but I'll personally add my vote AGAINST Seagate. They're a huge company, and Apple uses a lot of their drives, but I've had a disproportionate amount of trouble with them. The Apple-stock 100GB Seagate drive in my MBP had a tendency to stall and park the heads for no reason at all at random intervals, which was mildly-to-moderately annoying, and I've had probably three times the infant failure rate of Seagate desktop drives at home and work when compared to other brands.

Personally, I tend to buy WD unless there's a good deal or good reason for a Samsung or Hitachi. I put a 500GB WD Blue in my MBP recently and it's been flawless--silent, fast, and it was dirt cheap. My desktop WD GP drives have a tendency to sleep when you don't want them to (their power management seems to get along badly with the OS's), but I still like them and I haven't had that problem at all with the 2.5" Blue.

As an aside, if you're after speed rather than space and have a fat wallet, SSDs are preposterously fast compared to any spinning hard drive--the IOs per second, and thus app launch speed and similar random access, is over an order of magnitude better. For us mortals with limited budgets, though, a large traditional drive is still the more realistic option.


Should add: The specific drive I bought was the WD5000BEVT (Scorpio Blue 500GB), on sale at Amazon for $70 a few months ago. Really good price, in my opinion, and according to reviews (my experience backs this up) the drive runs quite cool with max throughput around 83MB/s, which is pretty good for a 5400RPM drive (heck, it's not all that bad for a 7200RPM drive, though a 7200 will beat it on latency).

 

[MacDawg]

Which hard drive from Western Digital would be one that you would personally suggest?

I have the WD Scorpio Blue 500 GB 5400
It has been flawless for me

 

[rekhyt]

Retail laptop drives will usually come in a pretty shelf-ready box, and also a much higher price tag. "Bulk" drives, which you presumably bought before, almost always come in an anti-static bag like that, usually in a specially padded mailing carton of some kind. They're not used, that's just how they ship.

Alright then.

Everyone has a different opinion on the best drive, but I'll personally add my vote AGAINST Seagate. They're a huge company, and Apple uses a lot of their drives, but I've had a disproportionate amount of trouble with them. The Apple-stock 100GB Seagate drive in my MBP had a tendency to stall and park the heads for no reason at all at random intervals, which was mildly-to-moderately annoying, and I've had probably three times the infant failure rate of Seagate desktop drives at home and work when compared to other brands.

Personally, I tend to buy WD unless there's a good deal or good reason for a Samsung or Hitachi. I put a 500GB WD Blue in my MBP recently and it's been flawless--silent, fast, and it was dirt cheap.

Did you get the 5200RPM or the 7200RPM?

I have the WD Scorpio Blue 500 GB 5400
It has been flawless for me

Thanks for your recommendation!

Also, has the hard drive dimension requirements changed along the revisions for the MacBook Pro? I used MRumors and saw that MacBook Pros can take 12.5mm hard-drives but I currently have the MacBook Pro 15" from 2009 (Unibody) so I'm not so sure.

And are there any cons to using a 1TB harddrive in a laptop? (WD Scorpio Blue)

 

[BlueRevolution]

Seagate is getting a bad reputation lately, but I don't think it's entirely deserved. Makosuke's argument against Seagate is that it's a big company, but WD is at least as big and Samsung waaaay bigger, so I don't think that's a valid argument. I'd rather buy a hard drive from a big company than a no-name brand.

I'm currently running a 3.5" Seagate 7200.11 1.5 TB drive in my iMac. It has been running in that computer for almost a year and is still blazing fast and has never given me reason to doubt its reliability. The same goes for the 320 GB 7200.10 drive that shipped for the computer, although it was noticeably slower.

They're not laptop drives, but my point is that you shouldn't mistrust a manufacturer based on the opinions of a few disgruntled naysayers. Both Seagate and WD have great 3-5 year warranties, and if a drive failure results in data loss, you have no one to blame but yourself for failing to keep an up-to-date backup. As MacDawg pointed out, all drives fail sooner or later.

As for your 1 TB question, just remember that the biggest sizes tend to be on the bleeding edge. Expect higher failure rates and significantly higher prices. I'd get another 500 GB external instead, if you really need the space.

 

[rekhyt]

Seagate is getting a bad reputation lately, but I don't think it's entirely deserved. Makosuke's argument against Seagate is that it's a big company, but WD is at least as big and Samsung waaaay bigger, so I don't think that's a valid argument. I'd rather buy a hard drive from a big company than a no-name brand.

I'm currently running a 3.5" Seagate 7200.11 1.5 TB drive in my iMac. It has been running in that computer for almost a year and is still blazing fast and has never given me reason to doubt its reliability. The same goes for the 320 GB 7200.10 drive that shipped for the computer, although it was noticeably slower.

They're not laptop drives, but my point is that you shouldn't mistrust a manufacturer based on the opinions of a few disgruntled naysayers. Both Seagate and WD have great 3-5 year warranties, and if a drive failure results in data loss, you have no one to blame but yourself for failing to keep an up-to-date backup. As MacDawg pointed out, all drives fail sooner or later.

As for your 1 TB question, just remember that the biggest sizes tend to be on the bleeding edge. Expect higher failure rates and significantly higher prices. I'd get another 500 GB external instead, if you really need the space.

Is the vibration and noise as serious as catachip says it is?

Catachip: I ordered the 500 GB 7200 RPM drive from Seagate, and promptly returned it because the vibration and noise were too loud in my 15" unibody (and I had previously had the 7200 RPM 320 GB stock drive). I returned it for the Western Digital Scorpio Blue, 500 GB @ 5200 RPM. All of the reviews put it at the same or better speed than the Seagate drive, with less noise and vibration and much lower cost.

 

[Makosuke]

Makosuke's argument against Seagate is that it's a big company, but WD is at least as big...

You misunderstood; I was saying that Seagate being a big company was an argument in favor of them, but that my personal bad experiences overrode that:

They're a huge company, and Apple uses a lot of their drives, but...

That said, as far as hard drives go, Seagate IS a huge company when it comes to rotating magnetic media; they shipped more hard drives than anybody else (though WD is close behind) last quarter:
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100323PR200.html

Sure, Samsung and Hitachi are probably 50 times the size of either, but the hard drive division of either is much smaller, which is all that really counts--we're talking about massive multi-sub-company conglomerates here, and it doesn't matter how many washing machines they make. Samsung's drive division is about a third the size of Seagate or WD, and Hitachi about half.

And you're absolutely correct that the only definite way to tell drive reliability is from a large sample; the StorageReview.com survey was the only worthwhile place to get such a thing, but sadly hasn't been hyped/maintained enough to have a good sample size on newer drives. That said, some problems are universal--the unsynchronized sleep on WD GP drives, for example (though many won't notice), and the weird Seagate stalls I saw on my 100GB 7200 2.5" are, I think, also due to the firmware not an isolated issue. And while I only care for 3 or 4 dozen drives, which isn't a statistically significant sample, I've had two Seagate catastrophic failures without warning, and needed to return two more brand new ones due to read errors, a failure rate of about 50%; I've only lost one WD out of about a dozen, and that was a slow failure that I had time to order a replacement on.

Incidentally, both Seagate and WD's warranty service is fine if something does go bad, though Seagate's was easier to deal with.

 

[BlueRevolution]

Is the vibration and noise as serious as catachip says it is?

Hasn't been an issue for me at all, but again, this stuff really varies from drive to drive and customer to customer.

 

[rekhyt]

You misunderstood; I was saying that Seagate being a big company was an argument in favor of them, but that my personal bad experiences overrode that:That said, as far as hard drives go, Seagate IS a huge company when it comes to rotating magnetic media; they shipped more hard drives than anybody else (though WD is close behind) last quarter:
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100323PR200.html

Sure, Samsung and Hitachi are probably 50 times the size of either, but the hard drive division of either is much smaller, which is all that really counts--we're talking about massive multi-sub-company conglomerates here, and it doesn't matter how many washing machines they make. Samsung's drive division is about a third the size of Seagate or WD, and Hitachi about half.

And you're absolutely correct that the only definite way to tell drive reliability is from a large sample; the StorageReview.com survey was the only worthwhile place to get such a thing, but sadly hasn't been hyped/maintained enough to have a good sample size on newer drives. That said, some problems are universal--the unsynchronized sleep on WD GP drives, for example (though many won't notice), and the weird Seagate stalls I saw on my 100GB 7200 2.5" are, I think, also due to the firmware not an isolated issue. And while I only care for 3 or 4 dozen drives, which isn't a statistically significant sample, I've had two Seagate catastrophic failures without warning, and needed to return two more brand new ones due to read errors, a failure rate of about 50%; I've only lost one WD out of about a dozen, and that was a slow failure that I had time to order a replacement on.

Incidentally, both Seagate and WD's warranty service is fine if something does go bad, though Seagate's was easier to deal with.

I don't think I'll be dealing with the WD GD, as I'm only thinking about getting WD Scorpio Black/Blue. Having the crashes with Seagate might be one problem though.

Hasn't been an issue for me at all, but again, this stuff really varies from drive to drive and customer to customer.

From what Catachip has said, it sounded like an air conditioner instead of a hard drive spinning.

Are the disks in the 7200RPM drives louder than the fans on a MacBook running at 6000 RPM?

 

[Makosuke]

Are the disks in the 7200RPM drives louder than the fans on a MacBook running at 6000 RPM?

Almost certainly much quieter. I seriously doubt new 7200RPM drives are any worse than those of 3 years ago, and my 7200 Seagate was barely audible at idle over the fans at idle; even seeks were relatively quiet.

Heck, most 3.5" 7200RPM drives don't make much idle noise these days, thanks to fluid dynamic bearings and whatever else has been improved. I was messing with some old 40GB drives a while ago, and MAN did those whine--I'd forgotten just how much better things are.

 

[cjlee07]

I recently upgraded my HD as well. I went with the WD Scorpio Black 320GB 7400RPM HD. I have been using it for about 6 months with no complaints. Quiet and fast. I purchased it from newegg.com with a bunch of other stuff and it just came in a static bag, but that bag was wrapped up in quite a bit of packing bubbles.

 

[rekhyt]

Almost certainly much quieter. I seriously doubt new 7200RPM drives are any worse than those of 3 years ago, and my 7200 Seagate was barely audible at idle over the fans at idle; even seeks were relatively quiet.

Heck, most 3.5" 7200RPM drives don't make much idle noise these days, thanks to fluid dynamic bearings and whatever else has been improved. I was messing with some old 40GB drives a while ago, and MAN did those whine--I'd forgotten just how much better things are.

7200 RPM then.

I recently upgraded my HD as well. I went with the WD Scorpio Black 320GB 7400RPM HD. I have been using it for about 6 months with no complaints. Quiet and fast. I purchased it from newegg.com with a bunch of other stuff and it just came in a static bag, but that bag was wrapped up in quite a bit of packing bubbles.

Nothing for me to worry about for the packaging then.