Macbook Hard Drive

[910803]

Hi,

I currently have an old Macbook (Intel Core Duo, 2GHz) running Leopard on it's stock 80GB hard drive,http://www.sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=StorageSolutions/2.5-inchHardDiskDrives/MK8032GSXPage].

Now, I want to upgrade to a higher capacity hard drive (any 160GB+ would be fine)

However, I'm not sure if I should go with 5400rpm or 7200rpm (or even 8mb or 16mb cache). I know the 7200rpm one would definately load things up faster, but I'm worried about the heat that it would create.

Which hard drive do you recommand? (I live in Canada, so I prefer buying from Canada Computers or Tiger Direct)

I was thinking if 5400rpm is fine, http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=018731&cid=HD.517.47]

Please Recommand me some good compatible hard drives (basically any S-ATA2 2.5" Hard Drives are fine right?)


*Oh and also, I have a Leopard installed on this computer. Since I've lost the original install CD, is there any way I can copy EVERYthing on the HD i have right now onto the NEW hard drive(incl. the OS X)*

Thanks.

 

[rwpritchett]

I upgraded my wife's macbook with a Western Digital 5400 RPM 320GB drive. No compatibility issues at all.

I used an external drive enclosure to clone the old hard drive to the new one using a free app called "SuperDuper!", swapped drives and everything still works to this day.

Here's the tutorial I followed:

http/www.macinstruct.com/node/130

 

[rwpritchett]

BTW, this is the hard drive model I used:

Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD3200BEVT 320GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive - OEM $79.99 CAD

 

[910803]

Thanks, was the switch any faster? (boot up speed, etc)

I'm thinking if I have 7200rpm one, it would be faster.


*Instead of "SuperDuper" isnt it possible to use the "Time Machine" that comes with OS X? I backed it up with my external hard drive already, hoping that it would work.

Thank you.

 

[rwpritchett]

Yes, I believe you can use time machine. I didn't because my wife didn't have a time machine backup on an external drive.

7200rpm would really help the access time. I was going to get a 7200rpm drive but at the time they were considerably more expensive than the 5400 drives.

The 320GB upgrade made the macbook a bit faster because it contains more dense platters (original was a 120GB drive), but I also upgraded the RAM to 4GB at the same time so that may also be why it seemed faster.