I'm looking to purchase an external harddrive that i can remove its hard drive to replace the harddrive in my macbook pro, and reuse the external case to put in my original harddrive. Understand? I know some of the WD External harddrives use a fancy non-SATA interface. Does anyone know of an external with sata interface?
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Upgrade HD from an External HD in Enclosure?
- Thread starter sprime1
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Personally I think it would be far cheaper to just buy an internal 2.5 drive and then buy a 2.5 enclosure for the old for a few bucks from microcenter or something.
I cannot comment on interfaces for retail external 2.5 drives, but I have a feeling there would be a lot of physical compatibility issues with interfaces and 12.5mm vs 9.5mm and whatnot.
Can you give an example of what size you were thinking of getting and for how much? I'll look around.
I cannot comment on interfaces for retail external 2.5 drives, but I have a feeling there would be a lot of physical compatibility issues with interfaces and 12.5mm vs 9.5mm and whatnot.
Can you give an example of what size you were thinking of getting and for how much? I'll look around.
Basically every hard drive uses SATA. The case will have an adapter that connects SATA to USB, for example, or SATA to Firewire, but when you remove the drive, you'll have a SATA drive in your hands. You'll be able to just swap the drives.
On the other hand, you might just buy an internal drive, plus a case. That reduces the chance of some manufacturer doing something that they think is clever and just interferes.
About 9.5mm and 12.5mm: New MBPs have space for 12.5 mm drives, old MBPs don't, and MacBooks don't. So you have to watch out a bit, but I think currently it is just the 1 TB drives that are 12.5 mm. And a new MBP is fine with it anyway.
I've got a 2006 Aluminum Macbook Pro, with a 320gb 7200rpm wd scorpion black. but i'm looking at purchasing a new macbook and putting in a 1TB 7200rpm if they have it, if not 750gb 7200rpm. but i want an enclosure that doesn't require an additional usb port for power. like i state before, the newer WD small 2.5" externals, the harddrive itself on the inside isn't a sata interface. it's like the microusb port is attached directly to the harddrive and it can't be removed!
Not anymore. WD Elements 3.5" external HDD has a USB port built in to the motherboard of the HDD. There is no USB to SATA controller. So if you open up the enclosure you will see a USB port directly on the HDD. I am not sure if the WD Passports (2.5") are the same. You would have to ask someone who has a HD Passport and ask them to open it up.
This is how I did it. Bought a Momentus XT and a $10 usb 2.5 enclosure. Put the XT in the enclosure, used CCC to clone my internal drive and then swapped them using instructions on iFixIt.