Jumper settings for WD Scorpio Blue in MBP

I just bought a new 500GB WD Scorpio Blue (WD500BEVT) for my Santa Rosa MBP (late 07/early 08). Also bought a pack of jumpers. Sooo.. (1) do I need to install a jumper for it to shuttle down from SATA-300 to SATA-150? and if so, (2) which jumpers should I short? 1 & 2, 2 & 3, or 3 & 4? Thanks in advance!

I did some experimentation with setting the jumper on my Seagate drive. After some initial bumps in XBench, I realized that it was a fluke thing. Over the span of a few weeks, there is really no substantial improvement or change.

I'd just leave the jumper unset, it should be fine.

I only ask because I remember, while perusing a post on the forums a few months ago, that someone mentioned buying a (pack of) jumper(s) and using one to set on the jumper block on the Scorpio, so that it would throttle down to SATA-150. I'll keep your response in mind, and keep digging. I won't be backing up (using CCC) or upgrading the HD before Tuesday of next week, anyway. Bought the drive today; headed out of town for the weekend, and will have my MBP with me, so I obviously won't be doing the minor surgical procedure until I am back in the friendly confines and have my tools at the ready.

Cheers!

Your mileage may vary of course, but I think this is more urban legend than anything else. The controller and the drive are smart enough to scale back to the fastest protocol supported.

Alright, so three days in, and so far so good... used the ExtremeTech upgrade guide, and it was fairly spot-on, except a couple small issues that I was able to push through... now then... perplexing question... the only place I see any drop in performance is on startup. Insofar as the upgrade, I got an external SATA enclosure, used CCC to clone my current setup to the Scorpio, and then moved it over. From every angle, the performance is up, with that niggling situation with the startup time now almost double. But nothing appears wrong. Should I try some measures such as running OnyX and/or doing a permissions repair? Suggestions, anyone?

Cheers!

This isn't as much of a "bump" as it is an update... still no other noticeable issues aside from the slower than expected (and slower than normal) bootup. Everything else is smooth. Temperatures are lower; battery life is unaffected; noise levels have dropped noticeably. I am very happy with this change.. not to mention 400 gigabytes heavier! LOL

Cheers!

cwa107 said:

Your mileage may vary of course, but I think this is more urban legend than anything else. The controller and the drive are smart enough to scale back to the fastest protocol supported.

Click to expand...

not always true. The original iSight iMacs, the G5s needed the jumper if you changed out the HD. I swapped a 500GB in mine, and it needed the jumper to recognize the SATA150. Probably newer models are smart enough though.

Alright.. with all this in mind... with Snowy comin out on Friday (and ya bet I'm gonna be stormin' the Biltmore store for my copy! LOL) would I be better served with doing a full backup and installing SL on the 500gig fresh, or do I need to leave 10.5.8 on here before I slip in the DVD? I'd love to do a fresh install to get the most (theoretically) from the new OS... anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

good question as I am going to be getting SL soon. I will probably just do the upgrade to save the hassle of doing a whole new install.

But back to your question of slower boot up time, I noticed this as well. Like in the beginning the white screen sits there for quite some time. Then when the apple logo appears and it starts spinning it only takes like 5 seconds and I am on my welcome screen to log in. Which I noticed after doing my big hard drive upgrade (from 160 to 500 GB hard drive) and it is a seagate momentus 7200rpm hard drive so shouldn't the boot up time be significantly faster? Or is this normal? I am a new mac user so I dunno maybe I'm going crazy....

I think I have solved the slow startup (Apple) screen issue... I'm sincerely thinking that it's because when I first cloned the stock HDD and moved everything to the Scorpio, I forgot to utilize the GUID partition table.. once I backed everything up, reformatted and reinstalled, using the GUID partition table scheme, my load times have improved significantly... I am now booting in about 21-27 seconds, and shutting down (ZOMFnG!) in about 4-6 seconds..

Cheers!