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Replacement internal HD recommendations


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Hey all,

 

Back in October I bought my 500GB drive to upgrade from the 320GB that came with my laptop. Since Apple supplied Hitachi, I saw fit to stick with Hitachi. But of course, the drive has failed me, and in fact it's the second Hitachi to do so (the first was replaced through AppleCare). So I'm looking to get out of the brand and try a new one. I'd like to see what the hivemind would suggest.

 

Secondary question would be capacity. I upgraded to 500GB because at the time that was what was most common in laptops, and my computer teacher associate suggested not to go beyond the bounds of what Apple is selling to avoid risks of incompatibility. But now, I'm thinking if I find a good 750GB or even 1TB drive that has a 3 Gbps link speed, that should be fine for my MacBook Pro 5,1, right? I like the idea of having some additional headroom, if I can.

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i installed a seagate momentus 750gb 16mb cache 7200 rpm's on my macbook pro and is working really nice!! got it at fry's electronics for $69.00

 

That's about what I had my eye on. Though I don't have a Fry's nearby, and their website isn't any bit helpful. So I'll probably have to pay the $119 or so at OWC…

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Yeah that's what I was looking at (though I'm still mulling over capacity options). Not a fan of spending money in general, but despite the good word I read everywhere about Hitachi drives, I've had two fail on me since I bought my laptop in '09, and I'm not all that impressed.

 

On the other hand, maybe I shouldn't be using the thing as a frisbee…? ((Kidding.))

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  • 2 weeks later...

I can't speak to either of those issues (never tried booting from FireWire), but I wound up ordering that Seagate Momentus drive, 750 GB, 7200rpm.

 

Turns out something also happened with my Time Machine backup which caused it to decide to not exist anymore, basically, so without going into detail, I'll just recommend not using FileVault if you don't know full well how it works or what you're doing, as well as remembering to do regular backups and all the other usual stuff.

 

Been about a week with the drive now, so far so good [knocks on wood]… though it kills me that while I was able to recover most data on the old drive using DiskWarrior, I lost 6 months of work on Logic projects. That's what I get for being a tightwad, I suppose. :?

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lookatthisguy,

 

Reading your post pained me.

 

Do yourself a favor! And yes, it involves spending money, but not much...

 

1) buy a Voyager. And here I've deliberately linked you to the cheaper of the two versions of the Voyager. It's USB3.0/2.0, forty bucks.

 

Then...

 

2) buy a raw hard drive. As your personal shopper, realizing that you're on a budget :roll: I picked the drive that has the best dollar-to-storage capacity ratio for the size.

 

So far we're looking at $115 that will:

 

• give you 2x the capacity of your internal drive so that you can...

• partition it into two drives, giving you two time machine backups (when one gets full, use the other partition)

• save you grief AND, to be selfish, save me from having to read another one of your sob stories (heh).

 

Now, the only "downside" is that it's USB. But that's cuz you're a cheapass :roll: and you don't want to spend the extra bucks it would cost for the FW version of the Voyager. "What?" you say, "there's one that would cost me a little more but would give me FW capability, plus the ability to boot off that drive if I ever needed to because it's FireWire? And.. And.. And that I could use it as a recording or project drive or a sample drive because it's FW?" And to that I answer, "well, it's YOUR money :roll: " and you say, "well, I'm not THAT cheap! :evil: Show me a link to that drive! :!: " And so I say, "OK, here's a link to a nice little package that, for $160 you can have the real-deal FW version of the Voyager and the same drive capacity.

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Yeah, I know, I had that coming.

 

((And BTW, it's not so much about being a cheapass as it is about this morbid fear that if I spend my extra money, even when I know I need what I'm spending it on, I'll wind up needing it for something else once I don't have it. A product of growing up without much extra cash, I suppose, though I guess that's another unintended sob story.))

 

As it stands, in order to recover data, I also bought a 2 TB Seagate FW drive which I decided would be a project drive once I reclaimed all my data and felt it was safe to wipe that drive. So now I'll have a total of 5 drives, totaling 4070 GB of storage space, but looking at it now, I think I will take your suggestion. Except I'll opt to use the eSATA connection, since, in the words of Mel Brooks, "when you got it, flaunt it."

 

My concern was never about booting from the drive using FW, that was something allsound threw out there which I took as a reply to tic_stu. But anyways, thanks for the advice, and I hope you didn't get too much of a headache from all that eye-rolling! :roll: :lol:

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I definitely got a headache, as I make it a point to act out all of the emoticons before I add them to my posts. Going through the motions helps me tremendously in choosing the right emoticon for the job. In your case, yes, a lot of eye-rolling ensued. But it was all for a good cause: to get you to spend some money so that you won't have the (truly) heartbreaking situation you wrote about.

 

Headache's gone now, and instead I'm sporting a :D because you're gonna spend some money!

 

:mrgreen:

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Well, I decided to open myself up for that to be a shining example for others. But yes, I am going to be moving more aggressively on the things I need (and want) for the studio, and hopefully I'll get it right this time.

 

Incidentally—speaking of spending money—I'm looking into subscribing to MPV and checking out your MIDI 101 course… Hoping I'll pick up some ideas/pointers that may help me make my cues sound more realistic (particularly one I've posted on here before). So there you go. More money.

 

But if I can't cover my rent, don't be surprised if I come knocking on your door with a bag on one shoulder and a MIDI controller in the other… :lol:

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Hi latg,

 

I'm flattered that you're considering checking out my MIDI tutorial. However, there's nothing in it that would help you with making MIDI mockups sound more realistic. So thank you muchly, but save your money. It won't help you really.

 

Oh, and if you do end up knocking on my door you'd be more than welcome, I'm sure -- especially if you're carrying a nice bottle of chianti.

 

:)

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