Do I need a special hard drive for macbook pro

My Macbook Pro 15" (2.8 due core) took quite a bump and it seems to have damaged the hard drive. I get the "please restart" error upon startup and have tried everything in the world to fix it. My question is: do I need a speacial hard drive, or will any 2.5" laptop hard drive work? I have heard mixed reviews. I have been told that any hard drive will work fine, yet I have also been told that the fan will always run at high speed if I don't use an Apple specific drive. Please help.

Thank you.

monkeywhistle said:

My question is: do I need a speacial hard drive, or will any 2.5" laptop hard drive work? I have heard mixed reviews. I have been told that any hard drive will work fine, yet I have also been told that the fan will always run at high speed if I don't use an Apple specific drive.

Click to expand...

You're listening or talking to the wrong people...because they are wrong!

I hesitate to say that 100% of all 2.5" hard drives will work in your MacBook Pro...but the VAST majority will. You need a 2.5" SATA hard drive...that does not exceed 9.5mm in thickness (most meet this dimension). Only some really large (over say 720-750gigs) capacity 2.5" SATA drives may exceed this.

Go to these guys for your HD (below) and you'll be good to go:

OWC

- Nick

Apple uses drives from several manufacturers, they don't make their own, so there is not an "apple specific" drive really. You will have to format the drive when you go to install OSX onto it but that can be done from the installation DVD using Disk Utility (if you have Lion it can be done with Disk Utility in Lion Recovery). The only real limitation to HD choice is to make sure it is a SATA drive (not PATA or IDE) and the drive thickness needs to be 9.5mm, some 1 TB laptop drives will not fit because they are bigger (12.5mm)