Hard Drive upgrade

Hi, I'm looking for some advice in deciding to upgrade my hard drive

Machine:
13" Aluminum Macbook (Bought in late 2008)
2.0 Ghz, 2GB 1067 MHz DDR3, 160 GB HD

I currently have only 20 GB left on my hard drive and noticed it got very sluggish and am looking to upgrade to a 320GB Hard Drive.

1) Would it be recommended to get a SSD?
2) What Hard Drive would you recommend?

Speed, reliability, and a quiet drive would be my biggest qualities looking for..

Thank you in advance for the help!

A 320 GB SSD is going to be expensive. You can buy a 7200 RPM 320 GB drive for a lot less. Anyway, take a look at what the OWC website has to offer. They specialize in Macs and have a wide selection of hard drives including SSD types.

LINK

Regards.

An SSD 320GB are rare (Not even sure they're mass-produced yet). The highest I see a 256GB costing $600. Unless you have the cash, not even a viable option. If it is within your price range though, you'll see some speed increase but definitely not worth $600 (Couple seconds off here and there).

There are a lot of HD deals out there, but I'd check out Newegg and/or wait until after Christmas for some great deals.

IIRC when I was doing research on an upgrade for my '08 white MacBook I found out that SSD's won't fit (too tall?). Might be wrong about that...but agree, they are very expensive.

I ended up with a 500GB Hitachi Travelstar HDD for about $80. Very easy to install, quick, quiet as a mouse, cooler than the original and no problems so far.

Instead of installing a new HD, why don't you just buy a big external and move everything you don't use all the time on your mac to that? I have a 500 HDD and whenever I'm done downloading and watching any of the movies or TV shows, I just move them right over to my western digital 1TB HDD. I'm sure you already know this though. I guess I just don't understand removing an HDD from a notebook that only has 20gb left on it. What happens to all the stuff you have on it?

ih8pc said:

I guess I just don't understand removing an HDD from a notebook that only has 20gb left on it. What happens to all the stuff you have on it?

Click to expand...

I transferred everything I had to my replacement 500GB hard drive (also very easy) giving me all of the original data plus another 400GB of free space.

An external drive is always an option. We have a 1TB external on all of our Mac's for Time Machine plus a 3TB NAS/media server, but the whole idea of a laptop is portability...at least for me.

If you are going to go the SSD route you should get a small one. Enough space for the OS, applications. Then you need to hook up an external HDD for storage purposes only.

Even then this seems kind of like a hassle to me and I would rather much just get a 320 or 500GB HDD.