Tag Archives: Upgrade

MacBook Pro and the Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200RPM Drive

Posted by on June 7, 2009 58 comments

I went ahead and picked up the granddaddy of all laptop hard drives for my MacBook Pro – the Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200RPM with SATA 3.0 (model ST9500420AS). I upgraded from a Hitachi 320GB 7200RPM drive and boy, what a wonderful difference!

Using Carbon Copy Cloner, it took roughly 3 1/2 hours to clone the contents of my 320GB drive to the 500GB. 120GB of photos was the #1 slow down, and #2 was the 320GB drive dragging its proverbial feet. Once the cloning was done, replacing the 320 with the 500 took about 2 minutes – 5 little screws (1 brace and 4 stabilizers on the drive).

The first thing I noticed was that the 500GB Seagate drive boots about 40% faster than the 320GB Hitachi. Apps open up a little faster – not 40% faster, but certainly 20% or so.

Once I’d booted up, I ran several tests and scans on the drive to make sure the drive was going to be stable and error free. Nothing sucks quite so much as banking on a new hard drive, only to have it melt down. Tests showed no drive flaws.

I then ran an XBench test to compare the two drives. The 500GB drive scored well over twice as fast as the 320GB with sequential and random reads/writes. For the non-techies, this simply means that this new Seagate drive whips the snot out of the Hitachi drive.


(XBench is a free utility that every Mac user should have, even if it’s rarely used.)

On the down side, the Seagate drive is just as loud as the 320GB Hitachi. That was a little disappointment to me. That said, the drive isn’t “noisy” per se, it’s just that the spinning is clearly audible in a near silent room or if one listens within 6 or 7 inches of the laptop body. No huge deal.

Other positives? XP boots and runs faster in Parallels. So does Windows 7. So does Linux. Photoshop CS4 opens up 25% faster and runs actions in an instant. File transfers to other 7200RPM drives are way faster. In short, pretty much everything is better and faster.

The best part of all? After Leopard, tons of apps, tens of thousands of photos, etc. I’ve got about 300GB free. Awesome!!

If you’re considering buying the Seagate 500GB drive, I hope these comments help. And hopefully you wind up with a good stable drive that passes any tests you subject it to.

Upgrading RAM on the new MacBook Pro (unibody)

Posted by on November 15, 2008 9 comments

After Apple generously replaced my ailing 2.4GHz MacBook Pro with the new unibody 2.4GHz MacBook Pro, I went from 4GB down to 2GB RAM. Even though the new MBP has a faster bus speed and better hard drive, I felt the shortage of RAM when using Final Cut, Photoshop and Parallels.

Crucial and newegg to the rescue! I ordered a pair of DDR3 1067Mhz RAM chips for $125. That’s pretty affordable!

Here are a few shots to illustrate how easy it is to upgrade the RAM (and, coincidentally, the hard drive) in the new MacBook Pro and MacBook. Thankfully, upgrading RAM and hard drives on the new unibody MacBook Pro is easy and won’t void or risk the warranty. (Just don’t sneeze or drool onto the logic board when doing work and you should be fine.)

 
First, remove the battery plate and battery. This exposes the hard drive for easy replacement if you ever want to upgrade to a 320GB 7200RPM drive or even one of the new 500GB 5400RPM drives. (I wonder if the MacBook Pro could be run off an external 10,000RPM SATA drive like the VelociRaptor. That’d be awesome!)

Removing the battery plate does not expose the memory bay like in the earlier MacBook Pros, so there’s more work to do.

There are 8 screws to remove from the bottom plate of the MacBook Pro. You’ll need a simple jeweler’s screwdriver. Remember the order of screws as there are three different sizes.

Here you can see the inside of the MacBook Pro exposed. It’s gorgeous. I was pretty impressed with the exterior design of the MacBook Pro, but this shows it’s true inner beauty.

This is where the RAM chips go. There are little tabs on each side of the chips. Pulling those tabs apart by less than a millimeter will “eject” the RAM for removal.

You put the new RAM in and take the old RAM out. You do the hokey pokey and turn yourself about. (Gag, I know.)

Here you see the new RAM installed. Check out the logic board and fans. Everything is so compact, tight and compartmentalized.

Another inside shot.

Put the botom plate back on and put the screws back in. Tighten well, but not too much. You don’t want to strip the threads.

That’s it! It took less than 5 minutes for the whole operation. With 4GB RAM, boot time is marginally better, but the real benefit comes with running larger apps like Photoshop, Parallels, Final Cut, etc. I can have much more going at one time than I could before.

A side note: I also notice that the new MacBook Pro runs much cooler than the old versions. When running generic apps like Mail, Safari, Firefox, etc., the old MacBook Pro would usually keep at a warm 130°. When running Photoshop and/or Parallels for more than a few minutes on my previous MacBook Pro, the internal temp would rise to no less than 160° and would often top 185°. This new unibody MacBook Pro runs between 96° and 110° for normal apps and hasn’t risen above 130° even when running Final Cut. Very cool, indeed!
 

Replacing a Hard Drive in a MacBook Pro – The Good, the Bad, The Ugly

Posted by on February 29, 2008 10 comments

After becoming accustomed to upgrading to newer MacBook Pro models every year, I finally convinced myself that I’d try hanging onto the same 2.16GHz laptop for a little longer, even if it was out of warranty and a whole 240MHz slower than the latest-greatest. I already had 4GB RAM installed, so I figured it’d be best to just upgrade the hard drive. Granted, the 160GB 5,400RPM stock hard drive I was using had more than 60GB free, so I wasn’t exactly aching for storage, but bigger is always better, right? I found a great 200GB 7,200RPM SATA drive on newegg.com for only $139 after $30 rebate, so I bought it.

I cloned my 160GB drive to the 200GB drive. Unfortunately, it took nearly 4 hours thanks to the 80GB of data running over a USB 2.0 connection. USB 2.0 sucks. Really.

Once the cloning was done, I got my handy-dandy Torx screwdriver set out and began disassembling the MacBook Pro. I used the awesome (but somewhat outdated) instructions from iFixit.com.

MacBook Pro, ready to go. Note the awesome Dr. Bodelin’s Laptop Bumpers that keep the MBP raised up a little for heat dissipation. I have a set for each of my laptops, my wife’s laptop, etc. You should, too.

Beginning surgery:

Removing screws from the body of the MacBook Pro is simple.

I found that placing the screws along side the iFixit instructions made things easier on me. So many screws, but so little to worry about.

Lifting the top off the MacBook Pro is easy… kind of. The rear, left and right pry loose with almost no effort, but the front was a real pain in the butt. There are some little plastic tabs that are hooked just under the lip of the front bezel. They just don’t want to let go. After a leap (or tug) of faith, I wrestled the entire top of the laptop off.

Pretty stuff under the hood:

Old drive with heat sensor:

Old drive and new:

200GB drive snugly in place in the MacBook Pro:

Putting the MacBook Pro back together was dirt simple. It took no more than 4 minutes and everything looks as good as it did before the whole upgrade process.

- – - – - -

The Good
After replacing the hard drive, I’ve got nearly 120GB free space. Wow. I noticed that moving data to and from my FireWire 800 backup drive is much, much faster. A 10GB transfer used to take 6-8 minutes, and now it rips through in less than 4 minutes. Parallels seems to open and run faster, too.

I’ve noticed almost no increase in heat with this new drive, and it’s actually quieter than the 160GB drive that came with the MacBook Pro. Hooray!

The Bad
With a 7,200RPM drive, I was expecting a serious decrease in boot time. I saw a significant increase – like 15-20 seconds slower. Converting AVI files to MP4 (for AppleTV) went from 5 mins 20 seconds to 6 mins 40 seconds. Time to open big RAW images in Photoshop remained the same. A bit of a disappointment.

The Ugly
During the cloning process, something must have gone awry, because the Leopard video drivers got seriously messed up. The colors on the MBP screen looked washed out and my 24″ LCD screen, which was previously gorgeous at 1920×1200, was now rendered dull brown-ish green in color and wouldn’t display anything above 1440×900. I re-installed the video card firmware update that Apple released in late February, but that didn’t fix it.

I ran a full battery of cleanups with Leopard’s Disk Utility and OnyX. Neither made any notable improvement.

After several fruitless calls to Apple Genius bars, I decided to wipe the drive clean and see how things would go. The fresh install of Leopard fixed the video problem, but it didn’t seem to make any difference with the speed I was hoping to see in the 7,200RPM drive.

Even with 4GB RAM and a fresh OS X installation, the apps I use most often seem to move at the same (or slower) pace with this new drive. Bogus.

Final Verdict
While I’m happy with the extra hard drive space, I am pretty disappointed with the fact that I’m not seeing any real-world, “holy crap!” increase in speed. Aside from the kick-ass transfer rates with my external backup drives, the 200GB 7,200RPM upgrade seems to have been a bit ho-hum.

 

Update on New Upgrade:

After using the 200GB 7,200RPM drive for a couple months, I swapped it out for a 320GB 5,400RPM drive made by Western Digital. Check out the installation process for photos, notes, etc. Comparing this modded 2.16GHz MacBook Pro to my newer 2.4GHz MBP, they’re really running about even.

These same display problems eventually plagued my 2.4GHz MBP and I had to have Apple replace the logic board. Thankfully, that fixed it – and it was free. – Jason