Hi y’all,

My Macbook (Late 2009, not a pro) has just had a pretty major system crash that resulted in it not booting up at all & when I was running disk utility it wouldn’t repair permissions & came up with unrepairable hd errors.

So on the advice of various people on the internets I reformatted the hd & restored the system from Time Machine (how good is that by the way?)

My main concern now is how reliable will the hd disk for the future?

I don’t want to be having to do this on a weekly basis & am happy to change the HD, but… ideally I want to put the biggest quickest one I can in but have no idea what I would need to put in there.. any advice gratefully received (unless you’re a smug pc user who’s come here to gloat)

I filled the 160 drive in our mac book with a 1 tb drive. Somehow performance isn’t as good as I hoped. Occasionally it pauses which is a little annoying. I suspect it isn’t quick enough to cope with the machine. I can live with it but it was a slight disappointment.

biggest & fastest for the money you can afford is the rule with any HD upgrade

It might be worth getting a SSD instead of a HD (you can get 256GB ones for just over £100 now)
This will have the bonus of making the Mac run a lot faster than it currently is.

Thanks, but what spec drive is needed? I know its 2.5inch but beyond that…

I just took the Mac into pc world and asked, bought a hd off the shelf. Did the time machine restore and its all working fine.

Make sure you properly destroy your old drive. maybe paranoia but it is just to be on the safe side…

All the info on the apple site under support, also see ifixit.com for nice pictorial how-tos for your specific model. 9.5mm tall SATA IIRC though.

It’d dead easy to do. Here’s how I’d do it:

1) Get a new HDD, and an external enclosure for it (or buy an external you know you can get into, tis what I usually have done).

2) Use “SuperDuper!” to clone your current HDD onto the external.

3) Swap the drives, power it all up

4) You’re done! System exactly as before, no faff.

I’ve upgraded HDDs on my 2007 MBP and my wife’s 2007 white MB several times. The MB is dead easy.

If you use Time Machine and Lion then I’d recommend popping out the old drive and installing Lion fresh onto it. Then restore the content from Time Machine. When I used Carbon Copy to clone the drive content to the fresh drive it worked well, but did not clone the Lion restore drive and also meant I could not activate ‘find my mac’. I think the newer versions of CCC might have fixed this.

The biggest mistake I ever made was replacing a 320GB 7200RPM Seagate disk in the MBP with a 640GB 5400RPM Samsung. The spinning beachball of death was like a constant companion on Aperture and iTunes. After a while I couldn’t stand it. Battery performance was no different in practice with the slower drive but performance was awful.

After this experience I decided to try a SSD. I slimmed down the internal HDD content by moving iTunes music and Aperture masters (now ‘originals’) to an external portable drive and by eliminating some junk. I popped in a SSD. Wow! The speed difference is marked. Apps open with barely a bounce in the dock. I’m never getting a moving drive inside a laptop again.

I have a late 2010 MBP. I have ‘upgraded’ to a Crucial M4 SSD. For a while now the latest firmware has been causing issues with Macs, so I’d avoid that brand. I have yet to down-rev mine and get the beachball of death for about 1-2 mins every 20-30 mins of use. Usually only happens with tasks that uses the HDD a lot, such as Time Machine and video editing. Plenty of other brands around though. It is way faster!

Reference I wish I found before I bought mine!

I’ve been looking on Amazon & was wondering if this one would fit?!

😉

I’d like to replace the HDD in my PowerBook with a SSD, but it seems I’m restricted by the fact it’s a 2003 G4 17″ with a 2.5″ IDE drive. There are caddies that take CF cards up to 64Gb, but I want to go higher than the 80Gb it already has.
One other option seems to be replacing the optical drive with a caddy and installing a 256Gb SSD in there, and putting a 350GB IDE in the place of the old 80Gb.
Anyone with a clue who can tell me if that would work ok?
I have a year-old Mac Mini that had the optical replaced with a regular 750Gb HDD giving 1.1Tb, but SSD’s were too expensive then to go that option.
It would be nice to get the Pb back into use, it’s in perfect condition, just full up.