It appears the hard drive upgrade for my MacBook Pro is mostly complete and successful.

I’ve had the stock hard drive in the machine and space was running tight. As a developer you can quickly fill up your hard drive with all sorts of things, especially artifacts from the compile process. Since the MacBook Pro still has a lot of life left, why not just upgrade the drive? Looking at Other World Computing‘s prices, I am amazed at how much you can get for so little money.

I settled on a Hitachi Travelstar 7K500, which is a 500 GB 7200 RPM drive. It’s one of the biggest and fastest 2.5″ hard drives you can get today. It’s not the fastest nor the biggest, but when I looked at all factors it ended up being the best all around. If this was going into a desktop machine I might be able to accept a little more vibration, a little more power consumption, a little more heat generation, but since this is a laptop, sorry, no.

The upgrade process was fairly smooth. I purchased the drive with OWC’s upgrade bundle, which includes their “On The Go” enclosure kit with the FireWire 800 interface. I thought it was also cool that their little upgrade toolkit was included. I didn’t really need most of the tools within it, but the nylon pry tool was useful. I installed the new drive into the enclosure, plugged it into the MacBook Pro, and used Disk Utility to format and partition the drive. I then used a Mac OS X 10.6 OS install DVD to reboot the machine (boot from the DVD). Once rebooted, I launched Disk Utility, selected a drive, selected the Restore panel and restored my internal drive (source) to the new external drive (destination). I let that run overnight.

Waking up this morning, I shut the machine down and went about taking the MacBook Pro apart. It’s actually pretty easy to do, so long as you have the right tools (e.g. anti-static wrist-strap). Plus, OWC makes a series of videos that show you exactly what to do. It’s mostly unscrewing a lot of little screws, the details once you get inside are where the videos helped most, but even then it’s pretty painless… just a matter of figuring out what to do.

So the old drive comes out, new drive goes in, reassemble the MacBook Pro, put the old drive into the external enclosure, and restart the machine. She started right back up, no fuss, no muss!

Performance? I can tell there’s an improvement. Going from a 5400 RPM to a 7200 RPM drive, plus whatever other advances are in the drive yeah, you can tell things are peppier. Any sort of read from disk is going faster, even just basic things like browsing in the Finder and listing the contents of a folder. I have noticed web browsing is faster, since web browsing can be very disk intensive as it reads to and writes from cache files. A good test will be later on when I start running Xcode and compiling, pushing real memory to the limits and involving a lot more virtual memory… how will swapping improve? I figure some, but just how much remains to be seen.

So far so good. There’s a lot of work still yet to be done, but that’s just a matter of time. I’m shifting around some files since I was able to make a better partitioning scheme. Spotlight is doing a full reindex and that’s going to take a while. I’ll suspend Time Machine backups during the day today and let it run overnight tonight since I’m sure it’ll have to do quite and extensive backup.

All in all, a good upgrade. Went smooth. More storage space. Better all around performance of the machine.

Now if I really wanted to see a performance upgrade, those solid state hard drives would be cool, but the price tag is scary! (OWC’s Mercury Extreme Pro SSD, 480 GB, $1579.99!!!). But OH the performance is wicked. 🙂

Updated: Now that I’ve been using it a bit longer, a few things to add.

It’s quiet. In fact, I think it’s quieter than my OEM drive (which was also a Hitachi). When I was working with the old drive in the external enclosure, I could hear it, clicking, whirring… not loud, but noticeable. But the new drive never made noise that I could hear above the rest of the din of whirring drives in my office.

Speaking of whirring, I don’t feel any vibration through the case of my MacBook. And maybe it’s just me, but it actually feels like there might be less. It’s hard to say. My body, specifically my left hand, is having a feeling of “something’s missing”. Like any vibration before was slight so the loss of it is barely noticeable. So maybe I’m imagining it, maybe I’m wanting to feel less vibration, but I can’t even say it’s vibration I am or am not feeling… just there’s a sense in my left hand (which rests over where the drive is located) that something is missing.

Heat generation doesn’t seem to be any different, at least that I’ve noticed so far. In terms of just what I feel through my hands on the machine, and smcFanControl’s temperature readout. That’s good.

Power consumption? Just have to wait and see. Not going to be using my battery any time soon.

The machine is still the machine. I can’t go faster than the CPU and video lets me go. But without question anything needing disk i/o is faster. Not some giant leap faster, but you can tell things are peppier.

I’m happy! All around good upgrade.