Went in with a little screen trouble, came out with big repairs!

[visim91]

So the other day I decided to make an appointment with the Apple Store over a slight buzz coming from my 24" ACD. The electric hum had sufficiently frightened me to get off my arse and take action as the Display was nearing the end of its AppleCare and I wanted to make sure this wasn't some small start to a substantially bigger problem.

Lo and behold! Upon presenting my ACD & Unibody MacBook to the Genus Bar I am told that not only could the ACD use a new fan (and some internal cleaning), but my MacBook could use a whole new screen due to some flickering issues. This is fortunate because I only ever use my MacBook in clam-shell mode and certainly would not have noticed this glaring defect until way after-the-fact. Very cool.

This chance incident has encouraged me to look into refurbishing the rest of my MacBook as well - spruce up the whole shindig with some new fixtures; particularly, some more memory and a new hard-drive (currently only 160GB). These are the two obvious upgrades.

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Here are my questions:

First: Is there anything else that could be improved upon?

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Second: At the moment my external hard-drive is burdened with my movie/TV-show collection, as well as my iTunes library - which has grown considerably over time and can no longer fit on my Mac's internal HDD. As a result, my music playback has begun to stutter as it slowly reads & transfers information...

Do I want to spring for a larger internal (7200rpm) Hard-drive or should I look for a small SSD to take the place of my primary internal hard-drive and replace the unused, dusty Superdrive with the larger (7200rpm) Hard-drive?

The whole idea sounds enticing - but will the added SSD truly mitigate the burden of multi-tasking? There is a tendency for individuals to blow subtle improvements out of proportion; not to mention I also heard there was a bottleneck in regards to SSD-use with older MacBooks... The discussion is convoluted and full of conflicting opinions - I just can't make sense of it.

Moreover, with respect to the second internal hard-drive: will it experience similar playback issues as my current external? Or is there some way to tie or integrate the SSD & HDD for a seamless experience?

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Much Appreciated.

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

First: Is there anything else that could be improved upon?

This is kind of impossible to answer without looking at it in person.

Second: At the moment my external hard-drive is burdened with my movie/TV-show collection, as well as my iTunes library - which has grown considerably over time and can no longer fit on my Mac's internal HDD. As a result, my music playback has begun to stutter as it slowly reads & transfers information...

What kind of external do you have? I've never had a problem viewing video or listening to audio over USB 2, much less FireWire 400 or 800.

 

[visim91]

This is kind of impossible to answer without looking at it in person.



What kind of external do you have? I've never had a problem viewing video or listening to audio over USB 2, much less FireWire 400 or 800.

Switching between songs pulls up the ol' rainbow wheel for a split second - something which never happened when the Library was internally stored. Oddly enough, video playback has no similar or noticeable issue.
It's USB 2.0

 

[thundersteele]

You could try a 7200 rpm firewire 800 external HD.

If the songs are stored on different parts of the HD, it needs a few milliseconds to move there.

If you feel comfortable taking your MBP apart, putting in a SSD and replacing the optical drive with a large HD sounds like a nice idea. I would get at least 128 GB for the SSD. Upgrading the ram of course is also good.

 

[visim91]

You could try a 7200 rpm firewire 800 external HD.

If the songs are stored on different parts of the HD, it needs a few milliseconds to move there.

If you feel comfortable taking your MBP apart, putting in a SSD and replacing the optical drive with a large HD sounds like a nice idea. I would get at least 128 GB for the SSD. Upgrading the ram of course is also good.

Unfortunately, this was the MB iteration where Apple (temporarily) choose to forgo the Firewire port.

 

[visim91]

Edit: Never mind, here I was getting all excited... but I don't need the SSD. I can't justify such a purchase.
A tie? Well yeah, seeing as I have only one tie, and it's clip-on.. well sure I could use a new tie...