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Upgraded harddrive, a must?

D

Draakvuur11

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 27, 2011
6
0
I'm hopefully going to get a macbook pro soon, my second apple product after my ipod touch.

I'm deciding between the 15" base line and the 15" high end model.
After seeing some benchmarks from the high end, compared to other high end laptops i'm a bit worried.
The macbook has great a great score on the prossesor and the videocard.
But when it comes to the harddrive the scores get bad, realy bad.
I will be new to mac osx and i don't know the effect of the speed of an harddrive.
And now i wonder, when i buy my new macbook, should i upgrade the harddrive?
And where do i buy the harddrive, on the applestore itself? Or somewhere else?
 
Just buy it and if you notice any performance issues, upgrade and use the old internal as a Time Machine backup disk. (I can't stress backup enough!)

Read my post about Apple hardware. You could walk into Best Buy and just pick up any 2.5" SATA drive and throw it into your Mac. You'll just have to format it, because new drives are either formatted NTFS or not at all.

If you aren't backing up, yo will eventually regret it. Time Machine has saved my precious gigs more than a dozen times!
 
What do you mean by a "really bad" hard drive benchmark? You aren't comparing it to an SSD are you?
Macbook Pros come with industry standard 5400/7200 RPM HDDs that have basically the same performance across all modern laptops.
 
Bad compared to other high end laptops
i don't know what kind of hard drives they have.
 
If you're talking about gimmicky over-bloated hair-dryers like the Alienware gaming laptops, of course they're going to have 7,200rpm drives.

Yes the MacBook Pro's come with 5,400rpm drives, but 7,200rpm is also an option from Apple.

Not only that, but whatever Alienware and Dell are using, they're going to be the exact same. Apple uses the same brands...
 
MrCheeto said:
Just buy it and if you notice any performance issues, upgrade and use the old internal as a Time Machine backup disk. (I can't stress backup enough!)

Read my post about Apple hardware. You could walk into Best Buy and just pick up any 2.5" SATA drive and throw it into your Mac. You'll just have to format it, because new drives are either formatted NTFS or not at all.

If you aren't backing up, yo will eventually regret it. Time Machine has saved my precious gigs more than a dozen times!
Click to expand...
But i heard that macbook pros that come with lion have no install disks.
How am i supossed to instal it on a new harddrive?
 
The benchmarks are not important, i just wanted to know if i should upgrade the harddrive
 
Just buy it and if you notice any performance issues, upgrade and use the old internal as a Time Machine backup disk.
 
Search Youtube for replacing and cloning the drive. They will show you apps to use and how to open and install it. It all couldn't be more straight-forward.

I would highly recommend Disk Utility for cloning (restoring) the drive to the new one. It's Apple software that comes preinstalled.
 
With Lion, I'm finding the Seagate Momentus XT 7200 rpm hybrid drives to be a significant performance enhancer. They're affordable, too, compared to all-hybrid. There is a battery-life hit, though. (These unusual drives didn't work so well for me under Snow Leopard, but under Lion they scream.)

There is nothing to compare to a real SSD drive, however. If you can afford that upgrade, do it.

But whatever you do, as others have noted: prioritize your backup strategy from the first day. You'll need one external drive (preferably two, or even more, to be used frequently in alternating fashion) at least twice as capacious as the sum of your internal drive's total capacity + that of any other drives that you want to back up (don't forget about them! ...Time Machine won't include them by default, so be sure you tell it to back them up too).

I also recommend Dropbox as part of your backup strategy. This free utility provides a folder on your machine and any others you link your account to. Any file you put in that folder on any of your machines is copied to all your other machines and to the Dropbox secure server, which you can access from any browser. The server's store is versioned, too, which makes recovering from a whoops very straightforward. Subscribe via this link and I'll get a small referral bonus... ;-) In any case, highly recommended. I keep all my current work in my Dropbox folder so it's always available and always backed-up even when I'm far from my Time Machine disks. If you're concerned about the security implications of using Dropbox or similar services like SugarSync (that's another referral link!), check out the instructions at Unvexed.

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Draakvuur11 said:
Can you give me a link to some kind of tuturial?
Click to expand...

http://www.ifixit.com/Browse/MacBook_Pro is my go-to site for upgrade tutorials.
 
One last question, i promise :p
Still not sure about which one i want to buy
The 15" base or 15 high end
Which one do you recommend?
 
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