Macbook Hard Drive Upgrade

hi all, im planning to upgrade my macbook's (2009 aluminium unibody) hard drive from its miniscule 150GB and was hoping someone could give me some advice as to what hard drive to choose. i have been looking at the Seagate Momentus Hybrid Drive and wanted to see if anyone with a bit more knowledge of hardware could inform me of any problems i might encounter with this drive, or to tell me that it will be fine if thats the case!

i hope ive provided enough info, but if not please tell me what you need to know and ill get straight on it.

thanks in advance =]

Hello and welcome,

Here is my recommendation...I put this in my late08 macbook uni 3 years ago an could not be happier. If you want bigger just get the 500...


Newegg.com - Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

hope this helps
Clay

I've seen reports that Seagate's Hybrid drives don't always play nice with Macs. Personally, I'd stay away from Seagate because of a firmware issue they had a few years ago. They released a large batch of HDDs with bad firmware, then pretty much told everyone that didn't have it mounted in a PC they were out of luck. If you have one of those drives in an external enclosure or a Mac, you couldn't fix it.

Since then I've always gone with Western Digital.

How are you going about this?

Hey guys, not to thread-jack, but how do you go about upgrading a hard drive on a Mac? My brother's got several devices I can use to convert SATA to USB, but being strictly a Windows guy, he's got no advise for me about how to clone a hard drive. How would you do it?

Also, would you recommend one of those hybrid drives? I've got a Macbook 4.1 running Snow Leopard and I'm wondering if it will offer any significant performance or efficiency upgrade over my stock Hitachi 120 GB drive.

Thanks!

rbzelman said:

Hey guys, not to thread-jack, but how do you go about upgrading a hard drive on a Mac? My brother's got several devices I can use to convert SATA to USB, but being strictly a Windows guy, he's got no advise for me about how to clone a hard drive. How would you do it?

Also, would you recommend one of those hybrid drives? I've got a Macbook 4.1 running Snow Leopard and I'm wondering if it will offer any significant performance or efficiency upgrade over my stock Hitachi 120 GB drive.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Having done owc ssd hd upgrade today, it was a breeze.
step 1 is get your new drive as external one with either enclosure or adapter
step 2 is to clean install your oxs to your external drive, press 'option' key after boot up.
step 3 is to copy over your data, file folders what not to your external drive using migration assistant, it is resides in disk utility and boot from external drive, install software updates to it.
step 4 is swap your drives in with new, out with old.
few weeks ago sound like a confusing one to me, here are the links one from owc.
the other from apple.
How to Transfer Your Data From Your Old Drive to a New Drive
Mac OS X v10.6: How to use Migration Assistant to transfer files from another Mac
on migration assistant concentrate with 'Time Machine backup or other disk' option.
Beware if you install with lion osx install from usb thumb may take 2 hrs and system upates will take another 2 hours, it is marathon one because of my slow connection, next
time might go to library for system updates.
Hope this helps.

Thanks ycl! Quick question regarding the clean re-install. I upgraded to Snow Leopard from the standard Leopard, using a CD, or DVD or whatever it was. Do I need to install from a disc that came with the computer, or the upgrade disc? If that information is in the links you sent me, I haven't read them yet, lol. If that's the case, you can ignore me.

rbzelman said:

Thanks ycl! Quick question regarding the clean re-install. I upgraded to Snow Leopard from the standard Leopard, using a CD, or DVD or whatever it was. Do I need to install from a disc that came with the computer, or the upgrade disc? If that information is in the links you sent me, I haven't read them yet, lol. If that's the case, you can ignore me.

Click to expand...

snow leopard comes after leopard, what you can do is install the leopard osx. then SL.

Great. Thanks for your help. I'll posting what I hope is a success story tonight. Turns out that Windows-loving brother of mine has a laptop sized hybrid drive lying around too.

good luck. once you get sad going, you will not want to go back to regular drive.

clayneal said:

Hello and welcome,

Here is my recommendation...I put this in my late08 macbook uni 3 years ago an could not be happier. If you want bigger just get the 500...


Newegg.com - Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

hope this helps
Clay

Click to expand...

Clay, do you know if the 2008 unibody can support as high as 500GB Western Digital? The OP's system had a 150GB. My 2008 unibody had the 250GB which I believe was the largest available at that time for the MB.