Thursday night my roommate and I decided to buy new hard drives for our Mac’s. I was running very low on my 100GB drive, and he wanted something better than his 160GB 5400RPM drive. I was looking into upgrading for a few weeks by now and was very tempted to buy this 320 GB Western Digital Scorpio that runs at 7200RPM. This is the same one that my boss, Carl, purchased for his MBP. The major difference is that he bought it from iFixit.com for $199.
I use one of the best programs for a Mac to backup your hard drive simply and cleanly, Carbon Copy Cloner, and best of all, it’s 100% free. The backup takes roughly 2 hours using an external drive interface via USB, and I begin the dissection.
I’ve installed and replaced several parts in Powerbooks before but not a MBP. It’s relatively the same,, with the exception of a few screws and innards. I like using the How-To’s on iFixit.com, they have everything from drive replacement to replacing the screen for Mac laptops old and new. I use the one suitable for my laptop of course, and in the end takes about 45 minutes or so to replace.
Almost 3 hours to backup and install a new 320GB hard drive into my laptop, not too shabby I think. Of course my roommate was done in about 2 hours because it is a lot easier to get to the hard drive on the new MacBooks, but that’s how it works.
The Good:
- Very easy to backup drive, CCC is very quick and safe
- No BIOS settings, plug the drive in, you’re done
- Fairly easy to get to drive once case is opened
The Bad:
- Too many screws to open MBP
- Apple uses some TORX screws to secure case and drive
The Verdict:
- Noticeable increase in speed with new drive (16mb cache)
- VERY quiet drive
- No vibrations (some people online complained about vibrations from the new drive)
- Well worth the $100
- Stay away from iFixit for hard drives;-)
