I just finished replacing the hard drive in my Mac Book Pro.  Unlike most notebook computers, this was not an easy task.  I had to remove 25 screws, remove the keyboard and disconnect two ribbon cables from the mother board before I could remove the old hard drive.  Fortunately there are many good tutorials on the web to follow. I used a video tutorial at Other World Computing.

My model came two years ago with a 160 Gb drive.  It was just plain out of space, especially after taking all the photos in Europe recently.  Although I find the Mac must better in terms of applications using disk space, the documents, music and photos all add up.

I decided to go with a 7200 rpm drive, instead of the traditional 5400 rpm.  That meant I would only get a 320 Gb drive, instead of 500 Gb.  I bought the Western Digital drive online at newegg.com for $99, plus tax. Shipping was free.  I arrived late in the day.

I put the new drive in my external hard drive dock.  This is a cool device that holds either a 3.5 or 2.5 bare SATA hard drive.  I ran SuperDuper to clone the existing drive to the new drive so once installed it would boot right up.  Since this external doc is only USB 2, it took awhile, 5 hours in fact.  It was now 11 pm and I was wonder if I should start this project.  Of course I could not resist.

I put a piece of paper on the desk and wrote down where all the screws were coming from and place the screws there as I removed them.  When I finally was removing the keyboard, the ribbon cable came disconnected before I could look underneath to see where it was attached, which gave me a bit of a startle. But I finally figured it out.

After the old drive was removed and the new on installed, and all the screws put back, I turned the computer on.  It seemed to not start and I was now worried.  But I guess it was just trying to figure out what to boot from since it had a new hard drive and shortly it started up.

I am very happy with the performance.  It seems to be a much faster computing experience.  The increase in performace could be from the faster hear drive, the larger hard drive with high density or the fact that I have much more free disk space.  In any case I am glad I went with a faster hard drive.  Only by testing a 5400 rpm 500 Gb drive compared with what I installed would one really know the best solution.

I did some benchmarking of the new drive compared with the what the database for the MacBook Pro.  The graphs below show how the new drive (in green) compare with what the baseline was for a MacBook Pro.  I included graphs for both random read and random write.  It seems the 7200 rpm does make a significant difference.  Click the graphs to view enlarged.

Internal 320 Gb 7200 RPM - Random Read

Internal 320 Gb 7200 RPM - Random Write

Just looking at the specifications, my new internal 7200 rpm drive takes no more power, has any more vibration or a higher noise level, compared with the Western Digital 5200 rpm drive.