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WD vs. Hitachi - 2011 13" MBP

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bubbasteel

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 4, 2011
1
0
Just need some advice from you guys. I just got a 2011 13" MBP with the stock 320gb drive. I am planning to upgrade the hard drive with either:

Hitachi Travelstar 750gb
Scorpio Black 750gb
Scorpio Blue 1TB

I would like to have the extra hard drive space, and was leaning towards the 1TB Blue. But I read that it did not fit in some of the older MBPs. Just wondering if anyone has a 13" MBP and has experience with any of these drives. Thanks in advance!
 
i had a hitachi 500GB TravelStar in my Classic MBP. On my new MBP, I have a Samsung 640Gb 7200 drive and they both are great drives.
 
which one is quieter and has less reliability issues? im in the same boat as the OP
 
5400 RPM drives tend to be quieter, as for reliability I have had no issues with WD yet (Aside from a single drive which was probably 6 years old), I have a number of friends with file servers that run Hitachis and they swear by their reliability as well. I'd probably say just grab whichever you need for capacity, and is the cheapest.
 
bubbasteel said:
Just need some advice from you guys. I just got a 2011 13" MBP with the stock 320gb drive. I am planning to upgrade the hard drive with either:

Hitachi Travelstar 750gb
Scorpio Black 750gb
Scorpio Blue 1TB

I would like to have the extra hard drive space, and was leaning towards the 1TB Blue. But I read that it did not fit in some of the older MBPs. Just wondering if anyone has a 13" MBP and has experience with any of these drives. Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...
I ordered the Scorpio Black. It's the fastest of the 3 with a power consumption almost as low as the Blue. Seems like there's more than a few Mac owners who are experiencing slowdowns, spinning balls with Blue.
 
The Hitachi is the better manufactured drive. In fact, it is probably the best quality 2.5" drive on the market. Hitachi drives are really IBM's drive unit which bought out Quantum back in the day.

That said, WD has worked out their quality problems over the years and is reasonably reliable now and offers capacities that conservative Hitachi won't.

So there's a tradeoff here- do you want highest capacity at lower quality or highest possible quality?

Seagate has historically been the most problematic and has the lowest quality design.

I say this as someone who has disassembled many examples from all these models, seen the internals, has friends in the drive industry who have worked for the manufacturers, etc.

I am currently using all three models, actually.

But in quality, which is usually my primary criteria, it is Hitachi >> WD >> Seagate.
 
I swapped my old Macbook's stock 5400rpm hard drive with a Seagate 7200rpm model - while I liked the additional space and speed, I absolutely hated the "spinning sound" of the 7200rpm model. When placed on a woody table there was some kind of reverberation audible in the whole room, so annoying that I swapped the hard drives back.

I'm sure not all 7200rpm hard drives cause this kind of reverberation, but if you are noise sensitive or working in a very quiet environment it might be wise to go with a 5400rpm model from the beginning. :)
 
econgeek said:
The Hitachi is the better manufactured drive. In fact, it is probably the best quality 2.5" drive on the market. Hitachi drives are really IBM's drive unit which bought out Quantum back in the day.

That said, WD has worked out their quality problems over the years and is reasonably reliable now and offers capacities that conservative Hitachi won't.

So there's a tradeoff here- do you want highest capacity at lower quality or highest possible quality?

Seagate has historically been the most problematic and has the lowest quality design.

I say this as someone who has disassembled many examples from all these models, seen the internals, has friends in the drive industry who have worked for the manufacturers, etc.

I am currently using all three models, actually.

But in quality, which is usually my primary criteria, it is Hitachi >> WD >> Seagate.
Click to expand...

You realize Western Digital bought Hitachi?
 
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