09-12-2009, 10:46 PM

Looking to replace 250GB harddrive. What should I get and what is compatible? Looking for 500GB or larger.

09-13-2009, 12:34 AM

Other World Computing has a large variety of hard drives and SSD's for your MacBook Pro. Link

Regards.

09-13-2009, 01:38 AM

If you are looking for speed and new technology I would replace with a new SSD hard drive.

If you are looking just for a new hard drive upgrade then I would maybe look at a seagate momentus 500gb 7200rpm hard drive. Depends on how much money you are willing to spend. I am on a budget and getting the momentus was a lot cheaper than getting a SSD hard drive and also it gives me a lot of space for the price.

Maybe I don't do a lot of crazy intensive things, but I honestly don't notice a difference in getting a SSD and an actual SATA HD like the momentus. I still get quick boot times and I am in the process of upgrading the RAM to 4gb and then I should be golden.

But I dunno this is just me I don't do anything crazy, just itunes, safari, email, and some photoshop.

09-13-2009, 03:21 AM

is the ssd hard drives really worth it? It doesnt really give you much for the price.

09-13-2009, 11:20 AM

That is where i don't know. I would google SSD vs regular HD and see if they have some specs,test,and all that to see if it is really worth it. It is really hard to tell the difference.

However SSD will most likely outlive regular HD due to the SSD not having any moving parts inside of it. And of courses have a faster seek time due to having no internal moving parts and flash memory.

However it is rather expensive and only for the hardcore enthusiast. I picked out some key points of SSD vs Sata HD.

-"Notice that having six hard disks does improve seek performance noticeably over a single hard disk, but the single SSD still dominates..."
What this is saying is that even if you had 6 HD (which you can't in a laptop but a desktop) the SSD is still faster than 6 SATA hard drives in seek time. This is why typically SSDs can boot faster than regular HD.

-"the SSD has such an advantage in seek time, it can show with an overall improvement measured in seconds to load a very large application"
If you open a large file, ur HD has to read multiple files in order to launch it. SSDs can read them quite fast and this leads to significant load times for LARGE applications.

However, in block transfer speed conventional HDs actually dominate SSD but only when you have 6 SATA HD in raid.

All this information of comparison was found here:
SSD vs. SATA RAID: A performance benchmark


My point is, I really don't think it is worth spending that much money unless you are doing some intensive stuff on your mac. If you want to spend the money on a small but fast HD and have the money to do so, then by all means do it. But I say go the route of a 2.5 internal SATA 500GB 7200rpm HD. You will be satisfied.