Internal Laptop Hard Drive...Help from those techies out there...

[Matt Bowden]

Hey all. I purchased a Quad-core i7 MacBook Pro a few months ago I'v already upped the Ram from 4GB to 12 GB. I'm getting ready to upgrade the internal hard drive and want some advice on what internal hard drive I should get. I'm not wanting to go the SSD route. The extra money just isn't wort it yet for me. I found out that there are actually 10,000 rpm drives. Can anyone suggest a great fast hard drive for me to purchase. Looking to spend $150 or less. Don't really need more than 500GB since I my footage will be on an external drive. Thanks for the help from all those techies out there. I understand some things but some of the specifications can get overwhelming.

[Tehben Dean]

Seagate makes a 750Gig 7200rpm Hybrid drive. It has 8gigs of built in
Memory I believe which supposedly speeds it up a bit. I haven't actually used one but they are relatively cheap and seem like a good "crossover" option until SSD get cheaper.

[Brian Merlen]

the 3g ssds at owc have been dropping in price a ton lately...making ssd's somewhat cheaper, but not if you want 6g, that's pricey still

[Matt Bowden]

Would I see a huge difference going from 5400 to 7200? Also, is the difference from the 5400 to the 3g ssd a noticeable diff. worth the money?

My macbook pro is so freakin slow right now. I get the wheel of death a lot, hanging programs and delayed type in some programs including firefox/chrome etc. Even happens when not connected to the net. Im hoping that the faster hard drive will help.

SO I'm looking at the 3g extreme ssd 120 GB. Do you think that 120 GB for general everyday use would be enough? Then I could just get a $100 USB 3.0 travel drive to keep photos and video on? With the size of hard drives these days its hard making the decision to cut my space by over 60%. Would editing all of my big projets off of an external drive eliminate to pros of an ssd?

[Brian Merlen]

yes you'd notice it...its more "snappy" to use ssd's. plus the tech specs in w/e nle you use probably requires 7200rpm at minimum these days. seriously if you need space consider the seagate hybrid...faster then ur current drive, AND more space....its pretty legit until ssd prices drop

[Matt Bowden]

wow thanks Brian, that seagate http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/834410-REG/Seagate_ST750LX003_750GB_Momentus_XT_Solid_State.h tml seems like a great option!

[L. Langer]

Intel is about to release a line of lower-priced but still high-capacity SSDs that might fit your needs.

[Matt Bowden]

So I ended up getting the 750 Seagate hybrid. I still can't comment on the drive. But I do want to make a few comments.

I Love Apple products. However, I am very disappointed in how they are trying to make everything so much more difficult than it needs to be. My $2000 MacBook Pro came with a cheap $40 5400RPM harddrive in it. Of course it failed...Im trying to do professional level video and graphics. All I was wanting to do is purchase and install a newer...better hard drive. So how do you get Lion on your new hard drive? You cannot purchase OSX Lion on a disk. In order to purchase Lion in Itunes you have to actually be ON the computer you want it installed on. So what to do??? How to get Lion installed on a new blank hard drive? Either fork out the $60 for apple to mail you a thumbdrive with Lion on it...even though you paid $2k for a laptop with Lion ON IT...or go to best buy and buy a 2.5" external case for your old hard drive, then clone it to the new hard drive, then reinstall Lion using the recovery partition. Wel this isn't working too well right now since the original hard drive is funky. All I'm saying is...I spent a lot of money on the computer include the F@#$% Lion OSX disc with the computer just in case something happens and I need to buy a new hard drive.

On a Second note, I HIGHLY recommend Other World Computing/Mac Sales. I've purchased things from them in the past and have been very pleased but today they took it to the next level. I didn't even buy the hard drive from them but tech support spent 2 hours with me on the phone working me through getting my laptop up and running. When his shift ended 30 minutes into our call, he gave me his cell number and proceeded to help me for 1.5 hours on his own time.

If anyone else has this same issue please let me know and I would be happy to give you the steps to getting lion on your new hard drive.

After I've had some time to work with the drive I'll post my opinion...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

@Matt...

Good choice on the 750GB Seagate. I didn't chime in here earlier, but it's about as good as it gets for notebook storage at the moment. IMO, the current crop of SSD's just don't have the price/performance ratio to justify their purchase. And yes, I've bought and used a handful of them.

If you have either the current generation MBP or prior generation, you can install Lion via the net, assuming you have already purchased and the EFI is up to date. If your system shipped with Lion on it, the Internet Recovery option is all you need. Other than that, are you sure you didn't get an OSX install disc with the system? Apple just replaced my 17" MBP with a new one via AppleCare and there was a disc in my box... Not to mention that my 15" MBP I've had since early last year and the iMac I bought in December for the family all included discs. Weird. Don't mean to drag this one out too much, but Apple should've threw you a bone on this one. Why was the Internet Recovery not an option or whatever?

Another nifty trick for anyone who has purchased and downloaded Lion... You can make a boot disc if you have access to the Lion installer app on a backup or other system. Apple doesn't tell you how, but it's pretty simple -- they really should make it an obvious option and dummy-proof it. Anyway, you just right-click (option click) on the installer app and choose to show the package contents. In the shared support folder there's a disc image you can burn to a DVD with disc utility and viola! Your own OSX Lion install disc. Really handy too because with every update to Lion, you can download the update via the app store and keep it on hand or burn that image out to a DVD. Then you don't have to install some old version of OSX and then install Lion over the top of that or to a different drive, you can just clean install, even on older Macs without the Internet Recovery option.

[Matt Bowden]

@Jeff.

100% positive that my macbook didn't come with the disc. My imac that I purchased three years ago did...I tried internet recovery but evidently that only works if you have a hard drive that has the recovery partition that will direct the comp. to the internet...what I was told....On a blank new hard drive there's nothing. Tried for about an hour and got the same results over and over again. Black screen full of text telling me that I need to restart the computer.

Another thing that I tried that didn't work, surprisingly enough, was to install Snow Leopard. I have a Snow Leopard disc with 5 serials. I thought I could install Snow Leopard via the disc then when it was up and running, pull up itune and pay the $30 and download Lion then upgrade. The new MacBook Pro would not let me install Snow Leopard. The person from Apple told me that since the laptop came with Lion on it, that it won't physically let me install anything on it below lion...i.e. Snow Leopard. I couldn't get it to work but that sounds pretty bogus huh?

I'm going to look into making a backup copy of Lion on a DVD the way you mentioned. This would be VERY handy if this situation were to arise again.

[Matt Bowden]

Wow, finally have everything up and running. This hard drive is smokin. Boot time with the stock 5400 rpm hard drive was 67 seconds...with this new hybrid it's down to 14 sec. Programs are VERY snappy and responsive. Very excited. This is like a whole new computer.

[Guillermo Tunon]

I've been using the hybrid momentus xt 500gb drive on my macbook 17' c2d 2.4ghz for about 2 years now. i love it. it's fast, snappy, works great. at the time it was a great alternative to expensive ssds.

this drive has been getting better and better with firmware updates, the latest sd28, made it finally perfect for a macbook pro, previous updates gave me problems with temperature, vibration and performance.

to anyone using this drive make sure you update the drive firmware to the mentioned sd28. best way is to have bootcamp and install it from windows, can't do from osx.

[Guillermo Tunon]

you can check the firmware on your drive in OSX under system information/serail-ata/drive/revision

[Matt Bowden]

@Guillermo...I love this drive. Its insanely fast compared to the stock hard drive. Also, as if the battery life on my MacBook Pro wasn't great already...I'm getting at least 40% better battery life. On general use, web surfing, etc I am getting like 10 hours not kidding. I can't seem to find out how to check the firmware. Where do I go to find "system information"? is it under About this Mac or System preferences somewhere?

[Brian Merlen]

glad that its working out for you!

[Guillermo Tunon]

@Matt: Go to About this mac>More Info>System Report>Serial ATA

[danu prasd]

Mine have Double Drives inside. I replaced the Optical Drive with products from OWC, called Data Doubler... here (http://eshop.macsales.com/Search/Search.cfm?Ntk=Primary&Ns=P_Popularity|1&Ne=5000&N=7854&Ntt=data+doubler) ...

Got a SSD as a System drive ( 120 GB ), and 750 GB XT from Seagate..Well, it's not so important to have XT as secondary drive, because the hybrid system is not working at its best. At first, I did have a problem when put XT on Data Doubler. Its always reject itself. Then when i swapped the drive, put SSD on Data Doubler, and XT on default drive connector, no problem at all. I don't know why, but it works till now...

I asked my friend that works at Apple Authorized Service Center, he said that this won't void the warranty...