08-03-2006, 12:50 PM

I thought I would share my experience of replacing the hard drive in my wifes Macbook. Since I am a fairly recent switcher I hope this may help others that may be thinking of doing the same thing, switcher or veteran a like. Here goes:

First I bought a Segate 100GB 7200 RPM drive from OWC. When you buy one make sure it's a SATA drive.


I used Super Duper to create a backup of my internal drive to my external USB drive. I copied it as a partition and not a file (Super Duper gives you several different options). After the backup was done when i looked at my external USB drive it looked like my internal drive.

I then installed the new internal drive into the Macbook.

When i rebooted i held down the option key and booted off the USB drive. It was a little slow booting up but the hard drive had everything backed up from Super Duper and it was as if i booted from the old internal drive.

From here i used the Disk Utility, selected the internal drive partition (if you dont have one already on the new drive you will need to create one) selected restore and dragged the USB partition to the source area and then dragged the new internal drive to the target area. I selected Erase destination and selected copy.

After the copy was done i shut down, removed the external usb drive and then rebooted. Everything came up as if I always had that drive. It was a little slow at booting up the first time but after that it was normal.

A few things to note during this experience:
1. When i installed the new internal drive i used the restore DVD's to install a fresh copy of OS X. When i did this i used the disk utility to create the partition and then installed OS X.

2. I was hoping that all i had to do after i installed OS X fresh was to boot up, use Disk Utility to restore my backup image to the internal drive. The only problem with that is you can not select a drive that you booted from as the destination.

3. I then tried booting from the restore DVD's and use the Disk Utility from there to select the source and target drives but for some reason it didn't work. It didnt allow me to drag the drives.

4. Since i had Super Duper backup to my external usb drive as a partition i was able to boot from it and then do the steps i outlined above.

5. I noticed that when i tried opening Super Duper again after the copy from the external to the new internal it told me that i needed to attach or mount Macintosh HD. Even though the new drive was named Macintosh HD i think Super Duper knows the difference between the two and was looking for the external drive. All I had to do was re select the Macintosh HD from within the program and everything was fine.

I hope my experience will help some of you thinking of replacing your HD. Their may be an easier way than what i did but this worked for me and everything is working perfectly.

08-03-2006, 01:03 PM

Thanks for sharing your experience.

What I would like to know is if the speed difference between the 7200rpm and the stock 5400rpm disk is really noticeable...or is it just a marginal increase.

Would make my decision between a 120GB/5400 and a 100GB/7200 much easier (they are more or less equally priced)... :cool:

08-03-2006, 01:08 PM

Originally Posted by Avalon

Thanks for sharing your experience.

What I would like to know is if the speed difference between the 7200rpm and the stock 5400rpm disk is really noticeable...or is it just a marginal increase.

Would make my decision between a 120GB/5400 and a 100GB/7200 much easier (they are more or less equally priced)... :cool:

After my wife messes around with it for a couple days i will post the results here. She doesn't do intensive stuff but she was complaining that it was slow at times while saving and opening. I also maxed out the RAM at 2GB about a week ago. That helped out as well.

08-05-2006, 12:36 AM

5400 to 7200 is on paper a %33 increase.

When i went from my 5400 60g to a 7200 60g in my dell inspiron it was a considerable task, i was gaming / gfx on it alot, and office apps and everything was loading faster and much snappier, i would never consider a 5400RPM drive again.

08-05-2006, 06:47 AM

Originally Posted by Mathiau

5400 to 7200 is on paper a %33 increase.

Yes, numerical that is true, yet it doesn't mean that the overall increase will be 33%. There are many more factors to consider...
As SATA drives with 5400rpm have considerably faster access times than PATA drives of the same speed, the original MacBook drive doesn't feel really slow.
So if the overall performance increase is only marginal, I prefer spending the money on capacity rather than rpm's, especially as more rpm equals more heat.
And we all know about heat with MacBooks and MacBook Pros... neye:

08-05-2006, 01:12 PM

^^^ yes very true, why i stated on paper

the new seagates with perpendicular tech and more dense platters = faster speeds, i cant wait for those 160G drives and 200G and higher they have coming out, i think the 160G maybe out, 5400 rpm....

08-05-2006, 02:36 PM

Originally Posted by Mathiau

^^^ yes very true, why i stated on paper

the new seagates with perpendicular tech and more dense platters = faster speeds, i cant wait for those 160G drives and 200G and higher they have coming out, i think the 160G maybe out, 5400 rpm....

They won't be cheap...

08-05-2006, 06:02 PM

i know, laptop drives really nail you for prices, arent things supposed to get smaller AND cheaper.....

08-05-2006, 09:29 PM

I talked to my wife and she says she noticed more of a difference when i put the 2GB of RAM in more so than the 7200RPM drive. She hasn't been able to play her games she usually does since her mother is in town for a couple weeks. Once she does i will try and give more details. right now she has only been checking her mail and iPhoto.

08-05-2006, 11:38 PM

OS X probabaly has excellent memory management, so it likely loads more items into ram, especially if she is using multiple apps at once

08-11-2006, 11:16 PM

Just wondering here, i see here and there people saying Serial ATA 100 only, would Serial ATA (SATA) 150 work? All i can find are Serial ATA150 laptop drives, and it's driving me nuts >.<

08-12-2006, 02:38 AM

no such thing as SATA 100, who ever says it is wrong you have

ATA133 (a maxtor thing)
ATA100 (standard more or less for current HD's )
ATA66
ATA33
ATA = IDE

SATA150
SATA300 (or known as SATA3G)
are the only 2 Serial ATA standards out.

SATA300 works in SATA150 ports.

08-12-2006, 09:28 AM

:/

Would this work in a Macbook? Hard Drive

08-12-2006, 12:15 PM

Yes, it will.

10-26-2006, 03:18 AM

Originally Posted by Mathiau

SATA300 works in SATA150 ports.

So in that case, would this work? I know it's overkill, but I'm just curious.
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/specs.aspx?EDC=968268

Sorry, I just noticed that it's 3.5' :dummy:
So, currently what's the biggest size hard drive available for the macbook?