MacOS – Installing hybrid drive in mid-2010 17-inch MacBook Pro

hard drivemacbook promacosssd

I'm looking to expand my internal 500 GB 7200 RPM HDD that came with my 17" MacBook Pro (mid-2010) running OS X Lion.

I'm interested to hear from other MacBook Pro owners who've upgraded their HDD with hybrid (SSD + hard disk) drives, especially if they're using the Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 32 MB Cache 2.5" Solid State Hybrid Drive ST750LX003.

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I have a late 2011 15" 2.2 quad core i7 macbook pro, and after using it with a 7200 rpm hard drive for about 2 months I decided to upgrade it to the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Hybrid drive. I am a iOS programmer and I can't tell you what a big difference this hard drive made in my computer. I did a couple of tests before I changed out my old hard drive like boot up time and opening programs and such. With my 7200 RPM hard drive my boot up time was 31 sec. and with the hybrid drive my new boot up time is 20 sec. I strongly recommend the hybrid drives. Seagate also just updated there hybrid drives with twice the amount of solid state memory instead of 4 GB they now have 8 GB. I hope this helps!

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MacBook – What hard drive is used for the 500 GB Macbook Pro option from Apple

I don't know about the 7200, but my mid-2010 MBP has the following (from system profiler):

Hitachi HTS545050B9SA02:

  Capacity: 500.11 GB (500,107,862,016 bytes)
  Model:    Hitachi HTS545050B9SA02                 
  Revision: PB4AC60W
  Native Command Queuing:   Yes
  Queue Depth:  32
  Removable Media:  No
  Detachable Drive: No
  BSD Name: disk0
  Rotational Rate:  5400
  Medium Type:  Rotational

I too had trouble with noise and vibration with a Seagate Momentus XT (the hybrid drive). After reinstalling the stock drive it's quiet and vibration free again.

MacBook – How much will adding an extra hard drive to the MacBook Pro affect battery performance

Having a second hard drive will certainly decrease battery life by a noticeable amount. Behind the CPU and LCD, the hard drive is the largest drain on battery.

A word of caution: RAID 0 is almost never a good idea, unless you'll be doing backups constantly and don't mind being totally down if a drive fails. You'll get better performance from an SSD and you'll be able to keep your optical drive.

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MacBook – What hard drive is used for the 500 GB Macbook Pro option from Apple

MacBook – How much will adding an extra hard drive to the MacBook Pro affect battery performance

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