Replacement HDD for MacBook

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koffiejunkie

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Hi guys,

I've upgraded my MacBook drive before, keeping to the same manufacturer and series drive (in this case Hitachi) to make sure that the motion sensor stuff continue to work normally.

Now I want to move to a 7200 drive, but the particular one I'm looking at is not in stock anywhere except at a few places that charge way too much.

Does anyone have a drive of a different brand running in your MacBook? I can get the Seagate ST9320421AS for roughly the same price as the Hitachi.
 
koffiejunkie said:
Hi guys,

I've upgraded my MacBook drive before, keeping to the same manufacturer and series drive (in this case Hitachi) to make sure that the motion sensor stuff continue to work normally.

Now I want to move to a 7200 drive, but the particular one I'm looking at is not in stock anywhere except at a few places that charge way too much.

Does anyone have a drive of a different brand running in your MacBook? I can get the Seagate ST9320421AS for roughly the same price as the Hitachi.
Click to expand...
Strange but I seem to recall someone suggesting something along those lines not long ago but you didnt want the extra speed or was it battery life? . . . :D

I've got a Seagate in my MBP (ST9250421AS).
 
bwana said:
Strange but I seem to recall someone suggesting something along those lines not long ago but you didnt want the extra speed or was it battery life? . . . :D

I've got a Seagate in my MBP (ST9250421AS).
Click to expand...

Both. At the time the 7200rpm discs showed a marginal increase in power consumption over the 5400rpm drives, and I didn't have a real need for the extra speed. Things have changed though - I spend a lot of time working with two virtual machines (doing development for disc hungry server stuff) so I'm now much more keen to do this, even if it does come at a cost of battery life.
 
Mine does seem to take much longer to boot than before.
 
Any hard drive should be fine. I've got a Seagate in my Macbook and it's perfect. No idea about the motion sensor but I'm pretty careful so it doesn't bother me.
 
Rewind said:
Any hard drive should be fine. I've got a Seagate in my Macbook and it's perfect. No idea about the motion sensor but I'm pretty careful so it doesn't bother me.
Click to expand...
The accelerometer is in the MB/MBP. :)
 
LOL!

Well, apparently my drive arrives tomorrow, so I'll have a verdict soon. Still trying to decide if I should do a fresh install or go the SuperDuper route...
 
koffiejunkie said:
LOL!

Well, apparently my drive arrives tomorrow, so I'll have a verdict soon. Still trying to decide if I should do a fresh install or go the SuperDuper route...
Click to expand...

you are a brave man to trust super duper/ CC cloner etc...
 
then u have had better luck than me, it has not been as problematic as CC cloner, but whilst working in apple support have had superr duper randomly miss information, even when it reports everything ok? I have also had more corrupt images with both those apps than with anything else...maybe i just have really rubbish luck with these things....
 
tau1z said:
then u have had better luck than me, it has not been as problematic as CC cloner, but whilst working in apple support have had superr duper randomly miss information, even when it reports everything ok? I have also had more corrupt images with both those apps than with anything else...maybe i just have really rubbish luck with these things....
Click to expand...

What is "CC"?

I'm pretty unimpressed with SuperDuper right now. It's dog slow. I checked quickly before starting the clone - just copying my aperture library with rsync from my notebook to the 7200rpm drive, pushed data at around 30MB/s. SuperDuper is only managing about 8MB/s. I trust rsync way more to copy data and make sure everything is right on the target (it can do checksums). I just don't know how to make a disc bootable?

What do you recommend for this job, tau1z?
 
Carbon copy cloner, i think it might be free. I find it slightly better than super duper, but still dont really like it.

U can use asr, ditto, rsync etc to make clones. U could even use disk utility i suppose. And i would rather use Disk util than SD or CCC.

What do u mean by disk bootable? do u have an image u want to burn to be bootable? disk util does that straight off.
 
Well, I don't really know much about how the Mac finds the OS on the disc. I know in the PC world it looks at the MBR, but since the Mac doesn't have that, I have no idea.

If I just rsync the whole drive, will it boot? I.e. does the firmware know how to read the filesystem and where to find the kernel?

I'm just cloning my hard drive - going from a 250GB to a 320GB and I don't particularly feel like starting with a fresh OS install.
 
koffiejunkie said:
Well, I don't really know much about how the Mac finds the OS on the disc. I know in the PC world it looks at the MBR, but since the Mac doesn't have that, I have no idea.

If I just rsync the whole drive, will it boot? I.e. does the firmware know how to read the filesystem and where to find the kernel?

I'm just cloning my hard drive - going from a 250GB to a 320GB and I don't particularly feel like starting with a fresh OS install.
Click to expand...

yeah, rsync should initially do a block level clone, which means the new drive will be bootable. U should simply have to stick it in and it would run. Occasionally i have had the mac struggle to find a bootable device, in which case u would hold down the "option" key upon boot and select your drive.

If u want i could post how the Os boots etc, but its long winded and nto really necessary for what u are looking for..
 
tau1z said:
yeah, rsync should initially do a block level clone, which means the new drive will be bootable.
Click to expand...

Are you sure? rsync does file-level copying - I don't see an option in the man page for block-level copy?

tau1z said:
If u want i could post how the Os boots etc, but its long winded and nto really necessary for what u are looking for..
Click to expand...

If I run into trouble I'll ask, otherwise it's cool :)
 
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