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Thinking abour replacing my Macbook Pro Hard-drive, worth it?

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xavious85

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hello everyone,

I'm fairly new to Mac, I bought my first on back in November. I have a previous generation MacBook Pro. I bought it for doing video editing on the road. I just moved to NYC so I needed something light to carry around with me yet still have power to do editing.

I'm fairly happy with my purchase. I bought a previous generation MacBook because I didn't see much benefit to buying the newest one and I got a great deal on it because I got it from Apple Clearance and also a student discount. The only problem was that you cannot customize items on clearance, they are the lowest models ready to ship.

No problem I thought to myself, I'll just upgrade it when I get it. So I bumped the ram up to 4 gigs and everything seemed fine.

Now, I'm editing High Def footage and I'm beginning to notice a slow down. Everything I edit is on external hard drives that are 7200 RPM drives. My 1 TB drive is using USB 2.0 and my 500 gig is using firewire. I'm still getting slow down and I'm wondering if my internal Mac Harddrive has anything to do with it. It is 5400 RPM. While the footage I'm editing isn't on the Mac, the programs I edit with are installed on the 5400 RPM drive.

I bought a internal 7200 RPM drive to replace it with, I'm just seeing if there is any point in doing it? Will I notice a difference in performance? Please advise!

P.S.
Another thing that may be the problem is I'm editing on Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 which lately seems unstable. This might be causing my slow performance with editing high def footage. My job has recently gotten a copy of Final Cut Studio 2 which I've installed. I just haven't had much time to play around on it yet to learn how to use it. I know importing footage from a P2 card is different than how you do it on Premiere and have yet to figure that out.
 
Yeah the 7200RPM should be a bit faster especially if you use the your internal drive as your scratch disk.
 
Ok, but I pretty much use my external drives as scratch disks with all the media on there, so would there be any performance increase to warrent opening up my MacBook Pro and voiding the warrenty?
 
xavious85 said:
Ok, but I pretty much use my external drives as scratch disks with all the media on there, so would there be any performance increase to warrent opening up my MacBook Pro and voiding the warrenty?
Click to expand...

Opening it up will not void your warranty unless you break something. I replaced my hard drive a few days ago and it was very easy. Just keep track of the screws.
 
Alright, I've built desktops before so hopefully this will be painless. Just a quick question, what is the best method to back up on a Mac?

I have some software on here that I no longer have access to. I absolutely need Final Cut Studio 2 as if I don't have a copy of it, I'd have to wait a couple of days until I get it the copy my employer has. Can I make an image of my current drive in Time Machine saved to an external drive, put in the new hard drive, install OSX and then replace that image from the external drive? If so, is it a pretty simple process?
 
xavious85 said:
Alright, I've built desktops before so hopefully this will be painless. Just a quick question, what is the best method to back up on a Mac?

I have some software on here that I no longer have access to. I absolutely need Final Cut Studio 2 as if I don't have a copy of it, I'd have to wait a couple of days until I get it the copy my employer has. Can I make an image of my current drive in Time Machine saved to an external drive, put in the new hard drive, install OSX and then replace that image from the external drive? If so, is it a pretty simple process?
Click to expand...

Time Machine, Time Machine, Time Machine. I had my dad's iMac G5 backed up on there. It went wonky, got it fixed, restored from Time Machine AFTER a clean install of OS X.

If you're talking about backing up for replacement, make sure you have that Time Machine backup first. Then buy your new HDD and an external drive enclosure (about $15). Download Super Duper. Find instructions to use it, and it basically clones the drive. Worked like a charm for me. Use your old HDD as a backup of some sort.
 
Well I did it, it got a bit nervous with ribbon cable glued onto the harddrive but I eventually got it off.

Prior to putting the new hard drive in, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my hard drive over to the new one and it worked great. Very straight-forward program.

I might even say that this drive runs quieter than the 5400RPM it seems so far. We'll see when I get into some heavy video editing. I'm glad now because I can load media up on my internal drive and do work somewhere other than the apartment where I'm tied to external harddrives.

The one thing that didn't go right was when I was putting the keyboard back on, the area around the super drive and the hinges didn't really settle in very well. Its not that noticeable though.

Thanks for all your help guys!
 
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