Harddrive Space

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I plan on soon purchasing a Macbook, and i was planning on going for the 160gb option, right in the middle.

what i am worried about is with the space taken up by Leopard, Bootcamp, and XP i plan to add, how much space will i have left for the stuff its actually meant for?
 

bobtomay

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Your Mac's Specs
15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
120GB drive
20 dedicated to XP - maintain 12-14 free on that drive
Leopard partition with almost 60 additional apps installed, have 50 free
 
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iMac 20" 2.4/4/320/Leopard, 12" PowerBook G4 1.5/1.25/80/Tiger
Picking the "right" hard drive size is getting trickier every day. My first impulse would be to bite the bullet and order your MacBook with the largest hard drive option available.

With all the digital media out there now (movies, music, photos, etc etc), you can fill up so much space so quickly. For example, a few TV show seasons in iTunes or ripped yourself, will quickly eat up a huge chunk of a 120 or 160 GB drive. Keeping 20GB marked off for Boot Camp (which for most of us is secondary to media storage) further limits the space you have for goodies.

Leopard's Time Machine creates the dilemma here. The larger the main drive, the larger the external backup drive you will need for Time Machine. Of course, this makes backing up goodies simple but only if they all fit on your main drive. Once you start storing them on an archive/secondary drive, they no longer get backed up with Time Machine. Which means, of course, you would need a *third* (yikes!) drive to backup your archived media drive.

My current solution is a portable drive for media goodies (so I can keep a healthy amount of disk space on my MacBook free), and a large external drive partitioned in half, 1 partition for Time Machine and 1 partition as a backup of my portable media drive.

Hope this makes sense? The short answer: get at least the 160GB -- for a mere $75 more, you can't go wrong. Thankfully the MacBook, unlike its predecessor, can easily receive a hard drive upgrade later.

--Chris
 
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2.2GHZ Macbook Pro - 4GB RAM - 500GB HD
Ive got a 120 and am using a 15GB for Vista. I've got 6GB of picts and 3 or 4 movies and have 60GB free.

T
 
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godfatherrr
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Hey guys, Thanks for all the replies!

You all seem to understand the idea that im putting out, and thanks.

I am buying the black one, so i automatically get 160GB, but i just cant see myself shelling out $150 for 250 when i could get double that for cheaper.

How easy would it be to upgrade the drive once i have the macbook?
 
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iMac 20" 2.4/4/320/Leopard, 12" PowerBook G4 1.5/1.25/80/Tiger
How easy would it be to upgrade the drive once i have the macbook?

Thankfully, unlike the iBook predecessors, the hard drive is user-upgradeable (with caution and a No 6 Torx tool). It involves removing the battery, a small metal cover, pulling out the old drive by its tab, and slipping in the new one.

--Chris
 
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godfatherrr
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Thanks Cris, but the root of my question was, how easy would it be to move all the stuff over? how could i copy the 160gb drive to a new one?
 
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Buy an external drive and use something like Superduper to back up your computer's "image" to the external. Install the new drive, restore the image and then use the external for daily backups.

Also, I am pretty sure the MB doesn't use Torx drivers. When I replaced my drive and added memory, all I needed was a small screwdriver.

T
 
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FWIW, i'd definitely buy a larger drive aftermarket, as opposed to ordering the computer with an upgraded one. It's cheaper in the long run, and you'll end up with an extra drive for data backup.

I picked up a drive enclosure for $25 on sale at Radio shack, and Cloned my hard drive using that. After that, it's just a matter of swapping the drives. FWIW, I also have the Black MB.

-Nick
 
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godfatherrr
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so nick--

you bought the macbook with the standard drive, bought a bigger one and a enclosure. put the big drive in the macbook and cloned the original one to it, then cleaned the original drive and put it in the enclosure for backups?

did i get that right?
 
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so nick--

you bought the macbook with the standard drive, bought a bigger one and a enclosure. put the big drive in the macbook and cloned the original one to it, then cleaned the original drive and put it in the enclosure for backups?

did i get that right?

Correct. I used Carbon Copy cloner, so I didn't even need to install OSX from scratch on the new drive and go through all the updates...it just creates a copy onto the new drive and you're good to go.

The only part about your post that's incorrect is the order. I cloned my original drive while it was still in the computer. Also, I kept OSX on the original drive, just in case. You can boot from an external USB drive, so I have that, should I ever need to.

The only thing that didn't copy perfectly was that I had to import my photos into iPhoto again. All the pictures were there, but I had to physically drag and drop them into iPhoto.

-Nick
 
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15" Unibody MBP 2.4 Ghz C2D, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD, 320 GB Time Machine HDD, 1 TB Ext Media Drive
When I had my MacBook, I bought it with the 60 GB drive. I bought a 120 GB drive and an external enclosure. Put the new drive in the MacBook, old drive in the enclosure, reinstalled Mac OS X, and let the Migration assistant run with the old drive connected. That way, I avoided the tedious process of using SuperDuper to restore an image twice.
 

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