Best replacement hard drive for a 2007 MacBookPro?

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Hi everybody,
I own a 2007 MacBookPro, 2.33 Ghz, 2Gb ram, 17" screen.
It came with a small very good Hitachi 7k100 (100 Gb) hard drive 7200 rpm.
Now I need more space and I would like to replace the hard disk with a bigger one, although I need the drive to be silent, fast and reliable.
What could be the best candidate on the market?

I saw that Hitachi (I am happy about my previous hard disk) does various models, among which there's the 7k200 (200 Gb), which costs a lot, but is the only one which is SATA I (1,5 Gbit/s = 150 Mb/s).
In Fact the SATA interface in my MBP is SATA 1 = 150 Mb/s. It should not handle correctly Sata 2 hard drives (3 Gb/s).

What can you suggest me?

Thank you very much in advance!

Carlo
 
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Actually, SATA 2 is backwards compatible with SATA 1, so getting an SATA 2 drive would be perfectly fine.

Are you in the United States or Canada? If so, then Newegg has some great prices on laptop hard drives.
 
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Well, actually I'm in Europe.. Italy.
What I don't understand, and indeed it sidetracks me, are the prices for Hitachi hard drives.
The Sata 1 model 7k200 (200gb - 7200rpm) costs more or less 89 dollars, while the Sata 2 7k320 (320gb - 7200 rpm) it costs 75 dollars.
Maybe the Sata 1 model was better made or has more features?

In Italy I managed to find a 7k200 at 165 euros (239 dollars), and the 7k320 at 71 euros (102,95 dollars)

I also read some articles in which it was suggested not to use Sata 2 drives with sata 1 interfaces..

Any advice?

Thankx!

Carlo
 
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Keep in mind that you don't need to purchase Hitachi. If you can find a drive from Seagate or Western Digital for cheaper, then I would suggest getting one of those instead. Just make sure it's a 2.5" laptop hard drive with an SATA connector. All hard drive companies make comparable products in terms of quality, so just buy whatever is cheapest.

Not sure where you got that advice, but again, there is no problem using SATA 2 drives in a computer with an SATA 1 interface.
 
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Keep in mind that you don't need to purchase Hitachi. If you can find a drive from Seagate or Western Digital for cheaper, then I would suggest getting one of those instead. Just make sure it's a 2.5" laptop hard drive with an SATA connector. All hard drive companies make comparable products in terms of quality, so just buy whatever is cheapest
.

I would have to disagree with the what was said above about all manufacturers products being of equal standard. There are widely differing specifications in hard drives, with some having larger buffer sizes than others. I believe that Hitachi are widely used due to their track record for providing stability. I agree that on paper all the hard drives should work the same as each other, but in reality there may be vast differences in true performance. The 7K100 has a buffer size of 8mb. The 7K500 drives have 16mb buffers and average of 12m/s seek times.

If however you are on a budget then by all means purchase the drive that best suits your pocket, but you possibly would be taking a risk in the long run.

This is all my opinion and not meant to offend in any way. I hope it helps.
 
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I'm not saying every hard drive is identical, I'm saying when you get drives of identical specs from each manufacturer, there are little to no differences between them in terms of quality. Obviously a 7200RPM drive is different from a 5400RPM drive and a drive with 16MB of cache is going to perform differently than one with only 2MB. It was silly of you to presume that I meant that all drives, regardless of specs, are identical.
 

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