upgrading mid-2007 macbook pro: which HDD

[humanliberty]

Hi all,

My wife's 2007 macbook pro desperately needs a new harddrive. I am not sure which one to buy. I am thinking about the following:

-A fast Western Digital one. Does black scorpion vs blue caviar matter? Do they all work on her pro?

-Seagate Momentus XT 500gb. I have read a lot of negative things about reliability and compatibility. I distrust seagate but some people love this one. By the way, she is running Leopard.

An SSD is too expensive and doesn't have enough space for her.

And might a RAM upgrade also be useful? From 4 to 6 it would be.

Thanks all.

 

[Badrottie]

I would like to hear about this too.

 

[radgar]

HDD choices

First, I'll get the SSD out of the way. A friend & I upgraded her 2007 white C2D MacBook from its original 80GB (or thereabouts) 5400RPM drive to a 120GB OWC SSD. The difference was startling. I'm about to upgrade my 2007 C2D 2.16MHz MBP to a 256GB SSD from its current Samsung 5400RPM 640GB HDD. I have been trimming the contents & shifting my iTunes to an external drive and rather overreached - seems I have <128GB including my 50GB Aperture library (>300GB of referenced masters on an external drive). I want some of that SSD speed.

Now, to HDDs. Before I had the, misplaced, need for more capacity I'd already upgraded to a 320GB 7200RPM WD drive from the original 120GB 5400RPM Toshiba(?) that was in the MBP. That move was very good. The machine was more responsive.

The 'upgrade' to the bigger, lower RPM drive has resulted in lots of SBBOD events, especially with iTunes and Aperture. Now, that is confounded by upgrades to SL and Lion but my wife's white C2D MacBook has my earlier 7200RPM drive and is very responsive with Lion. It rarely shows the SBBOD.

So, if you don't want to take the SSD route then I'd recommend a 7200RPM HDD with as much capacity as you need and the largest cache you can get (16MB?). 2.5" 1/8 height SATA HDDs seem to top out at 750GB. Manufacturer? I prefer WD, Seagate, Hitachi to other HDD makes in that order. That's more of a matter of personal preference. I wouldn't go for a hybrid drive, not enough improvement over a basic HDD for the extra money IMO.

RAM? Always max out your ram. Mine's limited to 3GB of addressable RAM. I installed a matched pair of 2GB sticks, but when I've played I've noticed no real difference in performance between 2x2GB and 2GB + 1GB.

Enjoy the upgrade process.