I just upgraded the disk drive on my early 2008 MacBook Pro today to 0.5 TB 7200 rpm drive. Oh I remember my first disk drive was a 20 MB winchester on a DEC LSI-11/23. I also remember carrying around DEC RL-05 disks. I was running out of disk space on my MacBook Pro which had a 200 GB 7200 rpm Hitachi TravelStar drive. There was not enough space for things like large VMware Fusion virtual machines, terrain maps for Silent Wings, video clips, etc. A 5,400 rpm drive is a non-starter for performance reasons, so after some looking around the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420ASG looked like the only drive to go with. The -G in the part number means G protection, but Apple has it’s own protection as well in the Mac Book Pro. And it feels good that Apple is shipping the Momentus 7200.4 in the latest MacBooks. I brought mine at Buy.com.
I was thinking of buying an external disk tray to mount the drive in while copying data off the internal drive and but then read the reviews at Maximum CPU and MacInTouch for the Newer Technology Voyager Q hard drive dock and deviced to go that route. I brought mine from MacSales/Other World Computing. At around $95 it is more expensive than a simple external tray, but it is also much more useful in jockying disk drives between systems. I connected it to my MacBook Pro over Firewire 800 and it worked great, including booting off the Firewire 800 to test the disk worked fine.
A small Phillips screwdriver and Torx T6 driver was all else I needed. I found the video below that shows how to do the physical drive replacement. I’ve had my MacBook Pro apart before so no mystery there but this is a great video.
The whole backup of the 200 GB disk using Carbon Copy Cloner took about two and a half hours over Firewire 800 to the Voyager Q. Physically swapping the disk took about 15 minutes. Piece of cake.
I was looking at the Apple Macbook Pro updates announced at the recent 2009 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. The MacBook Pro reduction in I/O connectivity is getting depressing. The 15″ and 13″ models get an SD card slot but they do so at the expense of an ExpressCard/34 slot. I reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984 “your chocolate ration has been increased”.
At least the SD card slot does support most popular SD size media as Apple clarifies here.
The MacBooks Pros have too little I/O connectivity. Yes I know Firewire 800 is great, but I thought these were Macs for professionals, not PC laptops. Now the 13″ and 15″ models have a single FireWire 800 port and two USB 2.0 ports and an SD card slot and that is it. And yes I know you just can’t count ports to measure really usable I/O performance but the sheer physical connectivity alone of the older MacBook Pros was very useful. FireWire 800 is great but many high-end users need e-SATA based RAID connected via an ExpressCard e-SATA adapter or for various other wireless connectivity or other uses. The 17″ MacBook Pro has an ExpressCard slot and is a great laptop but it is also a bit too big for many users. Adding an SD card slot and keeping the ExpressCard/34 slot would have been great – or they could have even bundled an SD card reader if they needed the marketing claim for SD card support.
I live and die based on my one year old 2.5GHz 17″ MacBook Pro with 3 x USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 and an ExpressCard/32 slot. A great laptop. And it usually has a SanDisk Multi Card Reader in the ExpressCard/34 slot. That reads more types of media (if anybody cares about Sony MemoryStick Pro) than the SD card slot built into the new MacBook Pros and much more importantly when I remove it I have an ExpressCard slot for other uses.
I am curious if Apple implemented a really fast SD card slot or if it works via USB 2.0 (like the SanDisk ExpressCard/34 adapter I use). Still that would not make up for losing an ExpressCard/33 slot.
Oh well with the matte screen only available as an option on the MacBook Pro 17″ many photography and video professionals and serious amateurs will see that as the only portable computer from Apple they can use. I thought at some time a matte screen for the 15″ MacBook Pro would appear. I take that as more consumer apathy or ignorance about color and color management than Apple making bad decisions.
