Hard-Drive – Tips for Replacing MacBook Pro Disk with SSD

copy/pastehard drivehardware-recommendation

I would like to replace my MacBook pro hard disk with an SSD, without reinstalling everything. I am looking for your experience on

good SSD drive models that have good performance at a fair price
the relocation strategy so that I get my old system migrated with no trouble or pain from the old hard drive to the new one (including additional hardware needed, I guess a usb-sata connector)

Best Answer

Allow me to recommend you the OWC ones. You have an “extreme RE” (which I believe you won’t need) and the Pro, which is arguably one of the fastest and most secure drives so far.

I’m sure you can google for comparisons with other drives but I’ve installed a various numbers of SSDs (albeit not only in Macbooks) and the OWC ones are what I’ve chosen for me.

Jeff Atwood himself made a comparison (but he didnt include the OWC at the time), which you can find in this blog post.

Don’t forget to read through the comments, as there’s value in there too.

I’d say that excluding the OWC (which I prefer), the Crucial C300 should be the next in line.

Related Solutions

Set up 2 FW800 JBOD units as a RAID 1(mirror)

I haven't tried FW800 specifically but we use a lot of OSX-RAID1 on internal drives and i used it once on FW400.

You just have to create a mirrored disk set from the external disks in DiskUtility. You should use the whole disks and let DiskUtility do the partitioning. That makes it easier to rebuild and boot off the set.

You can also start out with data already on one disk, then create a degraded set on a second disk, copy everything over and integrate the first disk into the set but this requires some non-supported use of command-line diskutil. The same goes for creating partitions on the RAID set or creating a RAID out of partitions. (All of which is perfectly normal and handy on e.g. Linux)

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.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Set up 2 FW800 JBOD units as a RAID 1(mirror)

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

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