I have the original 15" Macbook Pro Core Duo 2.16 and I want to upgrade the hard drive. How difficult is this to do? And also, what is the best hard drive with the highest possible capacity. I was thinking Seagate Momentus 500Gb..any suggestions?
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Upgrading Macbook Pro Hard drive
- Thread starter NavySEAL6
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the (arguable) best 500gb HDD is the seagate momentus (which you can find at newegg for ~$120) make sure though that you buy the version WITHOUT the suddent motion sensor, as that feature interferes with the buitin motion sensor of the MBP (this is true to any HDD including those which are not seagate, I think there is a WD that also have the feature.) If you want performance then you want to go for the 7200rpm version (I think so far only seagate and hitachi? have 7200rpm HDD wit 500GB as WD [i think] tops at 320GB for the 7200rpm and their 500GB version is 5400rpm [again i think])
Opening the laptop is very easy and apple did a great job putting it together so it is very unlikely you break anything.
Follow ifixit guide as reference but make sure to buy before hand a #00 phillips screw driver and a #6 torx screw driver (10mm) [though just in case your laptop is a bit different from mine a whole set of torx #3~#8 would be best besides their are cheap ~$5] as the ifix it guide does not mention this until the third or fourth page, also make sure you label the position of each screw as you unscrew it, as there are ~40 screws.
Also if performance is what you want (rather than capacity) you should consider SSD, it is true they are more expensive but now a day they are more affordable and makes a lot on sense in a laptop (more reliable) as well as is like 3 or 4 times faster, for more reference about an affordable 128GB SSD check this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/661948/
anyway good luck with your upgrade.