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Upgraded the HD in my 17" i7

T

tekmoe

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 12, 2005
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I couldn't see the reason of paying Apple $50 to upgrade my HD to 7200rpm when I could do it myself. So this is what I did...

I went out and bought a 320gb 7200rpm drive with 16mb cache for $69.99. I also bought a 2.5" SATA drive enclosure for $9.99. I pulled the stock 500gb 5400rpm drive and put it in the enclosure. So for about $80, I now have a faster drive in my mac AND I have an external drive to use for Time Machine backups or whatever I might choose to do with it.
 

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I plan on doing the exact same thing. I have never done it before but from what I've heard/read it's fairly straight forward.
 
I remember when I was little I used to try and emulate my father who is a Honda mechanic. I would try taking my bike apart and put it back together just to see if I could and maybe impress my dad in the process. That all stopped when I was riding one day and my front wheel came undone from the frame as I forgot a necessary bolt when putting the wheel back on. What followed was pain.

In other news I ordered my 15-inch i7 high Res MBP the other day. Went ahead and spent an extra $50 on the HARD DRIVE 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200. Money well spent if you ask me.
 
Great video, thanks! My main concern is installing osx on the new drive, since I will be doing this as soon as I get the laptop and wont have anything to transfer I have heard it is as easy as putting in the disks.
 
I'm looking into doing this soon but I want to get the 1TB drive. 500GB doesn't cut it for me really but the drive is a tad expensive.
 
I bought the 320gb just because 500gb is pretty much overkill for me. I do a pretty good job at archiving my data so I don't use a whole lot of disk space.

This is how I see it: Spend $50 to have Apple upgrade your 500gb drive from 5400rpm to 7200rpm. Or spend about $100 to upgrade your 500gb drive from 5400rpm to 7200rpm yourself and you get to keep your 5400rpm drive that came with the computer. It's a no brainer. And changing the drive is probably the easiest it has ever been in a Mac notebook. Anyone remember what it was like to change a drive in a PowerBook? Talk about a pain in the ass...
 
^^^^^
It is actually 5200 RPM (which is sort of odd), but it is across 3 platters and so that should speed things up a bit.
 
gooter80 said:
Great video, thanks! My main concern is installing osx on the new drive, since I will be doing this as soon as I get the laptop and wont have anything to transfer I have heard it is as easy as putting in the disks.
Click to expand...

Actually, it is just one disk. Then follow the instructions. Cake.
 
tekmoe said:
I bought the 320gb just because 500gb is pretty much overkill for me. I do a pretty good job at archiving my data so I don't use a whole lot of disk space.

This is how I see it: Spend $50 to have Apple upgrade your 500gb drive from 5400rpm to 7200rpm. Or spend about $100 to upgrade your 500gb drive from 5400rpm to 7200rpm yourself and you get to keep your 5400rpm drive that came with the computer. It's a no brainer. And changing the drive is probably the easiest it has ever been in a Mac notebook. Anyone remember what it was like to change a drive in a PowerBook? Talk about a pain in the ass...
Click to expand...

It's especially cost-efficient on the 13", because the upgrade costs about 150$. So I save 40$ and get an extra hard drive by doing it myself.
 
In my i7 17" I've got 512GB internal SSD and I swapped the optical drive out for the WD 1TB. It's really simple and it's awesome.
 
I like it a lot. In my old MBP I had a 7200RPM 500GB Seagate, and I frankly haven't noticed a difference in speed between it and the 1TB WD. It's 5200RPM, but it's got 333GB per platter so it's actually fast. I keep all my apps and my Aperture Library on the 512GB SSD, and iTunes all my videos on the WD 1TB. It's working great.
 
Plan on doing basically the same

Replacing the HDD in my MBP 15 when it comes should be a lot easier then what I plan to do with the drive that comes with the drive in MBP. I plan on putting it in my mac mini it can be a total pain in the ass to open and then taking that drive reformatting it and using it for backups...
 
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