New Hard Drive Options

[scarletmike]

So I'm pretty sure the HDD in my MacBook Pro is about to give up the ghost. It seems like the source of some nasty sounds and vibrations today. I'm all backed up (both Time Machine and manually), so I'm not too worried about data loss at the moment. I do, however need to figure out possible replacement drives ASAP so I can be ready to install the new one right away.

My first option(s) I am considering are the Western Digital Scorpio Black drives. I favor them over the Scorpio Blue series because of the higher cache, 16MB for the Black series versus 8MB for the Blue series.

Another set of WD drives I'm kind of interested in are the AV drives. Again, this is mainly for the high cache, 32MB. I'm having a hard time figuring it out, since System Profiler doesn't specify the spec with the word "cache," but I think the current drive has a 32MB cache.

The whole 5400 vs. 7200rpm thing isn't too much of a worry considering this is a laptop drive. The Black Series supposedly offers 7200rpms at the 5400 power usage, but its not too important to me. Would the Black Series be what I'm looking for, or might I want to consider the AV series? If there are any suggestions outside of WD, I'm open to those as well, but I have been pretty happy with my WD external drives which is why I'm leaning towards them.

 

[scott91575]

AV drives are meant for 24 hour a day usage (lower heat over long usage time). So you would be paying for reliability for something that is used to record data all day, every day. Not sure you will need it.

One thing you might consider is the Seagate hybrid drive. I am not normally a fan of Seagate, but the hybrid drives actually give you extra performance you will notice. Higher speeds and extra cache are nice, but you will rarely notice either of them in normal operating. Hybird drives on the other hand will make your operating system, especially startup, much faster. Just food for thought.

As for black vs. blue. The black will perform better during hard drive intensive operations, but it's not going to be something where you will really notice a difference most of the time.

 

[scott91575]

BTW...in case you were wondering what I was talking about with the hybrid drive, here is a review discussing it. They compare it to SSD's, the velociraptor (very high speed mechanical drive), and regular hard drives. You will see impressive gains for things that require random reads (OS type applications). For sequential reads it's not going to be much different, but for every day type activities it will be much faster. There is some WD black vs. blue comparison for you in there. Yet they used two different sizes, and number of platters and data density can effect random read performance. Anyway, take a look.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...mentus-xt-500gb-hybrid-hard-drive-review.html

There are two different generation 500Gb drives for the Seagate hybrid drives. They can be had for about $100 to $130 depending the which one you want. They are more expensive than normal hard drives, and not a ton of space. Yet it does give you some of the advantages of flash without the huge price (BTW...I have SSD's on my desktop, and yes, they are very, very fast).

 

[scarletmike]

I like the sound of those hybrid drives, thanks for the suggestion. It sounds like it uses the solid state portion as a kind of temporary load space for the data that stays on the HDD, so kind of like an advanced bank of typical memory, right? If that form factor will fit inside my MBP, I may spend the extra $30 on it. I would certainly find it worthwhile if it speeds up booting and applications like Photoshop. I might look at adding two more gigs of RAM as well.

EDIT: My current HDD is only 160, so even the smallest hybrid gives me a 90GB capacity boost. I have a 1TB WD network drive and a small 125GB WD drive I use for Time Machine right now (and only use TM for the system stuff and apps, mainly, so I can do a clean install quickly). I try to keep no more than 90GB of data on the internal drive at one time now, so space on the internal isn't an issue for me.

 

[scott91575]

I like the sound of those hybrid drives, thanks for the suggestion. It sounds like it uses the solid state portion as a kind of temporary load space for the data that stays on the HDD, so kind of like an advanced bank of typical memory, right? If that form factor will fit inside my MBP, I may spend the extra $30 on it. I would certainly find it worthwhile if it speeds up booting and applications like Photoshop. I might look at adding two more gigs of RAM as well.

They are meant for laptops (people with desktops have room for 2 drives so they can have a dedicated SSD), so they are 2.5" form factor. They should fit no problem. Google it to make sure. I am sure someone was in your same boat.

They use the flash portion for commonly used files, mostly the operating system. So it will give you quicker boot times, file opening, and pretty much any read type activity not a huge sequential read (like a video game install). I wish they had more than 4Gb of flash since the OS will use more than 4 GB, but as you can see it still makes a nice jump in performance during regular use. Flash improves random reads by a ton over mechanical drives, and OS's use random reads all the time.

 

[scott91575]

I looked around on some Mac and Seagate forums just to make sure it plays nice with Mac OS's. Looks like a handful of people had some issues, yet most state it works just fine. Plus much of this was a while ago, and may be cleared up by now. As with any HD, I recommend flashing new firmware as soon as you get it.

 

[scarletmike]

Yeah, definitely would be flashing it. I would imagine Snow Leopard hasn't been too much of an issue, and that is what I'm running. I've been trying to decide where I want to buy it from, so I haven't wandered to my usual spots to check how stuff behaves with Mac yet. Amazon has the 500GB for $99, and I have Student Prime (free 2-day FTW!), but I'll be at Best Buy tomorrow more than likely. I want to buy through Amazon and help out BP, but...I may have to get it at Best Buy (RewardZone coupons).

 

[scott91575]

Yeah, definitely would be flashing it. I would imagine Snow Leopard hasn't been too much of an issue, and that is what I'm running. I've been trying to decide where I want to buy it from, so I haven't wandered to my usual spots to check how stuff behaves with Mac yet. Amazon has the 500GB for $99, and I have Student Prime (free 2-day FTW!), but I'll be at Best Buy tomorrow more than likely. I want to buy through Amazon and help out BP, but...I may have to get it at Best Buy (RewardZone coupons).

I only see the $140 one at Best Buy (that same one is $124 at Amazon). I am not sure the big difference between the two 500Gb versions. I would have to look into that more. Yet one thing I have found is Best Buy is never good for hard drive prices. Do you have a Microcenter near by? They have the $99.99 version.

edit: I honestly don't see any spec differences between the two versions. Maybe one is OEM and the other is retail? I don't know. If that is the case, $25 to $40 is not worth it for some accessories and packaging.

edit2: Yep. That is what it is. I hate when they do that. They are the same freaking drives.

 

[jwinslow]

Yeah, definitely would be flashing it. I would imagine Snow Leopard hasn't been too much of an issue, and that is what I'm running. I've been trying to decide where I want to buy it from, so I haven't wandered to my usual spots to check how stuff behaves with Mac yet. Amazon has the 500GB for $99, and I have Student Prime (free 2-day FTW!), but I'll be at Best Buy tomorrow more than likely. I want to buy through Amazon and help out BP, but...I may have to get it at Best Buy (RewardZone coupons).

I would spend some time searching (by title) on slickdeals to get a gauge on what a good price is. There are some parts that aren't overpriced at Best Buy, but not many.