Macbook (Early 2008) HardDrive Upgrade

[shadeobrady]

Hey everyone - I'm going to be swapping out the crappy 5400rpm HDD that comes with the MB for a 7200. I definitely need speed and found 2 models that look decent. Can anyone recommend weather either would be a good buy, or maybe another I haven't seen?

Seagate Momentus XT 500GB SATA 3 7200RPM, 32mg Cache 4GB Internal Flash (fast bootups?)
Western Digital Scorpio 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3

The real question is whether or not it's worth getting the hybrid SSD - many people have reported getting the 4GB SSD to load their systems in seconds after they have tinkered with its memory settings.

Any thoughts would be grateful!

 

[chscag]

Either model will do fine. You're not going to get much more speed out of that MacBook no matter what you do. I know, I have one exactly like it and I put a fast WD 7200 RPM drive in it and added memory to up it to 4 GB. It's a bit faster but not by that much. The problem with that generation machine is it uses an Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics chipset which maxes out at 256 MB of shared memory.

My advice: Don't spend a whole lot of $$ on it. Just get what you can afford.

 

[shadeobrady]

Thanks for the quick response chscag - I had fears the graphics card was going to max me out so that's good to know. I'll probably save money and opt for the non hybrid model if that's the case.

Thanks again!