Replacing SATA II with SATA-600

[flangie501]

Hi Guys,

I'm new here and apologies if this tread is already somewhere else!

Basically I have a late 2008 unibody MacBook5,1 (2.4GHz Intel Core Duo) whose hard drive I upped to 750GB and ram to 8GB.

I've now been thinking of switching out the hard drive to a SEAGATE Momentus 2.5" internal hard drive SATA-600 7200rpm with 750 GB + 8 GB SSD memory.

My question is, will my MacBook support a SATA-600 hard drive? And assuming it does, would I first install Mountain Lion onto the SSD and then using disk utility replace my data from my Time Machine?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

S-ATA 6.0 Gbps (S-ATA III) SSDs and HDDs are backwards compatible with S-ATA 3.0 Gbps (S-ATA II) and S-ATA 1.5 Gbps (S-ATA I) interfaces, any internal HDD will not even saturate S-ATA 1.5 Gbps (S-ATA I) though, except something like the Momentus XT, even with its small flash storage, but S-ATA 3.0 Gbps (S-ATA II) is more than fine with that.


"Memory" is not the same as "hard drive / storage capacity":

• Computer Storage: Ram vs. Hard Drive Space
• RAM vs. Hard Disk

It is recommended, to have 10 to 20 % of the SSD/HDD's capacity unused.
The above links also apply to SSDs.

Btw, as the flash storage of the Momentus XT is integrated into the device and not a separate partition, you do not have the option to install OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion onto the SSD part.

Although Seagate hasn’t revealed all of the secret-sauce that makes the Momentus XT unique in the current market, understanding how the drive works is fairly straightforward. The 8GB of SLC NAND flash is used as a high-speed repository of sorts. The controller on the Momentus XT monitors usage patterns and copies the most frequently accessed bits of data from the hard drive to the solid state storage. And it all happens independent of the OS or drivers. According to Seagate, the data on the hard drives has to be accessed multiple times before it is copied to the solid state storage and the contents of the flash memory will dynamically and constantly change over time, based on usage. To put it simply, the most commonly accessed data on the platters gets copied to the much higher performing, SLC Flash memory, which results in a performance boost. And it’s not necessarily full files being copied, but rather the most frequently accessed bits of data. We should also point out that a new feature to the updated Momentus XT called Fast Boot uses a small portion of the solid state cache for data used during the boot process, which resides in a special location and won't change often, in order to maintain quick boot times.

from http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Seagate-Momentus-XT-750GB-Hybrid-Drive/

 

[flangie501]

Cheers for the reply dude!