Upgrade to 7200rpm hard drive on 2011 13 mbp?

[iekozz]

Hello,

I currently own a early 2011 13 inch MBP. It works great, but I have noticed a few issues with it and I hope I can resolve by upgrading to a 7200RPM HDD.

I've listed the questions down below:

1) When I wake my mac from a long sleep (> 2 hours) I get a pixelated view whenever I move with my mouse. It goes away after a minute or two, but it's really annoying. (See attached image).

Is dis due a too slow hard drive?

2) Sometimes, my macs wakes really slow from sleep. In the Apple store i've tried a mac and they all wake instant from sleep. Also slow HDD issue?

3) I also noticed alot op beachballs when it starts to load something or if it it busy writing and reading stuff from the harddrive.

Lastly, some warrenty stuff:

1) When I upgrade to a new harddrive, will I loose my warrenty? Or does Apple consider it user replaceable? (Think they do).

2) I have a Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS laying around that I can use. I've read that in some cases your Mac can crash and act really weird with this drive.

I realize that there alot of questions above, but I would really appriciated it if you could answer them .

Thanks,

Niek

 

[Detrius]

It sounds like it may be a *bad* hard drive due to (3). If this is the case, any new hard drive, even one supposedly of the same speed would make your machine perform better.

 

[chipchen]

All of those issues can be caused by a multitude of things... could be not enough free space on your hard drive, could be corrupt operating system, could be corrupt file system on the hard drive, could be not enough memory (RAM), could be bad video card, etc, etc, etc.

BUT, putting in a faster, bigger hard drive would definately help. Well, it can't hurt at all anyway.

 

[DWBurke811]

imo, if i'm going to take the time to open up my mac, i'm going to get a SSD. with how cheap they are now(a few months ago i paid around $170 for my 120GB vertex 3. after using it for a couple months, i would gladly pay $300 for a replacement) i really don't see any reason not to. it's night and day compared to a HDD; my friend has a early-'11 15" with a 2.2 i7 and platter HDD, for day to day stuff mine is magnitudes faster/"better." He was actually getting mad at me the first time we were studying together that he paid $1000 more than me, and his is a year newer, and mine smokes his in literally everything.

And since you're going to have your laptop open, I'd pop in 8GB of ram; even if you don't "need" it, it's never going to hurt to have more ram than you need. $32 shipped for 8GB of corsair ram is a no brainer to me; for less than the cost of a single dinner(not even counting drinks, just food for one) at a halfway decent restaurant, you won't have to every worry about running low on ram.

 

[iekozz]

Thanks for all your answers, I can certainly use all the tips and tricks! .

Also, 8GB RAM is a good idea aswell and cheap here in the Netherlands. (€ 42 which is about $54).

Thanks!

 

[szolr]

If you can afford it, replace the hard drive not with a 7200 rpm one but with a solid state drive. You'd notice some visible difference with that.