Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Laptop Drive Upgrade, January 19, 2009
This is the ideal upgrade disk - 16MB buffers, 7,200 RPM, very good IO scores from the benchmarking community. In early 2009, this disk is right on the sweet spot of high performance and low cost.
I think the guy complaining about an "OEM Drive" meant to say that this disk is not an external Firewire or USB disk in a cabinet. It is an internal drive, using standard SATA laptop connectors.
I upgraded my Macbook Pro's 120 GB drive because it was more than 80% full and I wanted to add another 10GB VM and several thousand pictures. Although OSX allocates files smaller than 20 MB in contiguous chunks, making defrag unnecessary, as the disk fills up, contiguous allocation gets more difficult and writes get slower. Since most user apps do some writing (browsers write lots of temp files), the whole system feels slower.
The result of the upgrade was to reduce the bootup time by 15 seconds out of 2.5 minutes, and double the launch speed of Firefox and similar apps (20s -> 10s).
My upgrade procedure was to set up an empty 120GB partition on my USB external drive, turn off Time Machine, and use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything. I did not select CCC's block-copy cloning, because I wanted to defrag some very large files. Done this way, over USB, took 3 hrs to copy, then 40 minutes with a screwdriver (not rushing, as this was the first time I've opened a laptop), and a little over 1.5 hrs to copy back from the external drive to the new 320 GB disk.
Afterwards, I set TM to ignore the transfer partition, and it automatically re-built my entire backup. I don't know why, but it stayed busy for several hours.
|
|
|
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great replacement drive for your laptop, December 8, 2008
I just purchased this drive as a replacement for the drive in my MacBook Pro. My laptop originally came with a 100GB drive 2 years ago, which I upgraded myself to a Seagate Momentus 200GB drive about 7 months ago. Now the 320GB drives are out and I upgraded again. The drive is quiet and has lots of room for whatever mobile computing you need to do. After the OS is installed there is about 267GB of free space--and that's plenty of capacity to fill up with work, music, videos, photos or whatever you need.
Seagate has managed to keep the drain on the battery with the 320GB identical to the 200GB drive, and while the drive got quite hot during the transfer of data over to the new drive (intensive disk activity), the normal operating temperature seems the same as the 200GB.
To get your data from your old drive to the new one, first download a free copy of Carbon Copy and install it on your old drive before you remove it. Buy a 2.5" enclosure with a Firewire 400 or 800 port and install your old drive in it. USB2 ported enclosures will work but they're much slower. Install the new drive in your laptop, plug the external drive in the FW800 port and boot up your computer from the external drive. Launch Carbon Copy and copy all your data over to the new drive. Reboot and you're all set.
You don't need to be a computer geek to install a new drive in your MacBook or MacBook Pro by yourself--although it will void your warranty unless you take it to an authorized Mac reseller/repair place. My MacBook Pro is out of warranty so it wasn't a factor for me. Google "installing a hard drive in a MacBook" and you'll find several sites that give either video or still picture instructions. I was able to swap out my drive and put my laptop back together in about 15 minutes. You'll need a tiny Phillips screwdriver and a Torx #6 screwdriver to undo all the screws, and a gentle touch so you don't strip the threads or the screwdriver sockets, but it's actually quite easy. Take care putting the screws back in and don't force them.
I have usually been buying all my bare drives through [...], but I've just discovered Amazon is quite a bit cheaper for exactly the same products--Amazon does it again! I'm learning over and over again to always compare prices to Amazon's, as Amazon always seems to be the better bargain. Add to that a terrific return policy and you have an unbeatable combination. Why shop anywhere else?
|
|
|
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect upgrade for my macbook, April 4, 2009
Pros: High capacity for form factor, fast, near-silent, runs cool.
Cons: None so far.
Bought it to replace the 160 gb 5400 RPM Fujitsu hard drive in my Macbook pro. I was afraid there would be a change in noise and heat, but so far noise is the same (virtually none) and it actually runs cooler. I didn't run any benchmarks but the system seems speedier. I don't know if battery life is affected.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
