Laptop HDD and RAM upgrade

So been meaning to upgrade the Macbook Pro for a while now, and I like how OWC in the US has nice simple kits and instructions for nice simpletons like me.
So can get a 500Gb 5400RPM (prefer this over 7200 because I like battery life) Hitachi drive, with an enclosure to chuck my existing drive in and toolkit, plus 4Gb of DDR3 RAM for about USD205 incl shipping. That's probably just under NZD300 once I get exchange fees etc in the mix.

That a good deal? Or worth doing locally instead?

Chur.

That's pretty cheap. You could probably match that locally if you shopped around hard, but meh *effort*.

However, I'd say go for the 7200rpm. The performance bonus outweighs the pretty minimal effect on battery life.

Righto, cheers. Looks like 7200RPM equivalent adds about $50 or so...

Actaully, might get one of these bad boys - http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_momentus_xt_review
Hybrid 500Gb 7200RPM HDD with 4Gb SSD on top of it for the most common tasks on the hard drive. USD125

I like the look of those.

Last time I looked the HDD only took about 10% of the total power requriements of the comp so there will be nothing in the battery life due to the spin speed. Maybe it will be even better if you dont have to wait so long to get HDD intensive stuff done.

Crikey. Only $20 difference locally.

5400 $105 inc
http://playtech.co.nz/afawcs0139235/CATID=233/ID=1256/SID=160342863/productdetails.html
7200 $125 inc
http://playtech.co.nz/afawcs0139235/CATID=233/ID=6609/SID=1051025654/productdetails.html

And mmmmm yeah I'm rather tempted by those XT drives. *Waits for an excuse to order such a thing*

Do you get a choice as to what data you store on the ssd part?

No, the drive firmware does it using black magic. Sounds like it works the way Windows Prefetch etc works. The drive knows what files are most frequent access much better than the user does.

Yeah think I'll go that XT drive. Rather beef the whole machine up now to get it to last another couple years at least and don't see SSD becoming cheap anytime soon - not in sizes I need anyway, 160Gb on this is way too limiting as it is.

Might get it locally though, by the time I ship it from the US and add GST/Customs malarky I'd rather just pay $210 for it here.

Too much shit on your laptop imo

Heads up: Bunch of mid-2009ish MBP's have big problems dealing with SSD's, and mate with an effected unit just tried one of these XT drives and had the same issues. Problems lies in the EFI firmware and it's a real problem. What model you have? Maybe give me a screen cap of your 'About This Mac' thing panel and I will ask if it's good to go.

Oooh cheers - I have the MacbookPro 5,5...

Aiight, just hit up my man, and he says it's the 5.4's that are the problem. He has managed to get it working on his 5.4 by downgrading the EFI firmware to 1.6 tho. But yeah you should be fine.

Righto, chur... Might hold out until December when my US-based bro is coming back. He can be my "mule"

Alright chucked one of them Momentus XT drives in yesterday - whole thing is much faster, although some of that will be down to the old drive being almost completely full.
2 "bounces" to start Safari, same for iTunes. Lightroom finally loads in less than a minute! WIll still take some time to optimise though, as just went through an entire Bootcamp Vista load and then upgrade to 7 so I suspect the flash drive is thinking "weird, this dude uses odd Windows install files HEAPS"

And man, for noobs like me, the ability to just format a new drive and then one-click install/restore back to an identical build from the latest Time Machine backup is pretty sweet. Would have had NFI otherwise

I looked at upgrading - in the end I went with a 500gig scorpio black for $126 its noticably quicker than the 250gig seagate 7400.4

I can now run an XP and Ubuntu 10.04 VM with decent response times on both as long as I dont copy large files.

And btw the drag and drop files on vmplayer is mint.. I was still using vmserver 2.0.2...

So... 3 months or so on from purchase, how is the Momentus XT working out?

....Also... Does anyone here have insight to their product lineup refreshes... I don't wanna get one in say... March only to have a 750gb and/or more flash version come out in April, y'know?

Thing with technology like this is that its ALWAYS changing and something better/cheaper is coming out. Find what you need will serve your purpose now at a cost that you can afford and buy it. If you keep waiting and waiting you will wait for ever.

Just don't ever buy anything and then you'll never have it made obsolete...

Oh I agree wholeheartedly. But if I bought one a month prior to a decent upgrade I'd be a little bummed. That said, the 500gb is plenty of space, I'm just being greedy

Hey man, yeah it's pretty sweet. Upped the RAM from 2 to 4 gig shortly after too so bit hard to separate where the performance gains have come from but even before RAM upgrade it had just slightly ticked up the opening speeds of main apps and startup time. Machine is now nice and quick again and plenty of space - pretty stoked that this thing will last me a while now with pretty modern performance levels. Runs Win7 damn quick too

Excellent, cheers
Going to upgrade just before the semester starts.

Also, I read an article today that seagate wont be doing a laptop drive upgrade until the later half of the year which answers that question...

Just found myself in possession of one of these hybrid drives. Cloned my laptop drive across to it and so far(10 restarts) it seems to boot a little bit faster and once booted loads up programs like firefox, outlook and itunes quicker concurrently. So far im not overwhelmed by its performance over a 500Gig WD Black 7200 2.5" drive but once it has had time to learn I will stick the old drive back in and do a timed comparison.

Right,

For start ups there isnt much difference.

I timed each HDD from finger print swipe to having loaded up firefox.

The initial swipe - the windows loading page is 10~11 sec (encrypted c drive through HP security tools)

The Time to the first Win7 noise as it beings up the full res loading screen varied a little bit. The XT was 31-38 seconds and got consistently longer each time I restarted. The WD Black 7200 500Gig drive was 33~34 the whole way through. Removing encryption knocked about 10 seconds off this time.

The time to the desktop loading (to the sound it makes)- The XT started at 47 seconds (from swipe) and settled at about 1m02sec. The WD varied from 1:00 ~ 1:30 with an average of about 1:10. 8 second advantage to XT

The time to load firefox from swipe was 1:08 ~ 1:17 for the XT and 1:21 ~ 1:36 for the WD.

Pretty underwhelming on start up times. Especially considering it is about $100 more ($124 v $225)

This is on a win7 64bit HP Probook 6540b with 4gigs ram. office 2010 etc on it.

I must say however that it seems applications do open up faster with the XT, especially when I try to open many at once. I think perhaps that windows gives priority to user opened apps at start up as I noticed the hdd keeps going a lot longer on the WD than the XT.

I had a kingston SSD on my desktop with similar specs to the laptop and that is noticeably faster. I also wonder how an XP install might compare and wonder if the hybrid is sabotaged by large page files and large PST files like mine (1.7gig) It might try to cache those due to constant access when other files would be more useful.

I also assume encryption doesnt affect it too much.

If I had had to pay for it I probably wouldnt have done it but am still happy with the performance. If you came off a standard (not WD black) drive then you might notice a big difference, especially if you reinstalled as I guess many people would.

Interesting, thanks

I definitely upgrading to a 7200rpm drive at least 500gb...
I only recently realised I can use my old one (250gb 5400rpm) as an external which didn't occur to me (duh) which be really handy this year I think.

Sometimes the obvious things elude us

I would assume it ignores large files like page and pst etc - when it only has 4gb of flash mem, it would be stupid to tie it up with a 4gb page file, which is what you'd have with 4gb physical ram.

I tried limiting it to 1024 which was fine for the purpose of the test, in fact unless i am running photoshop/ lightroom with lots of photos I dont think I often use up more than 2gb of pagefile.

I am interested to see why the boot times got consistently longer as I kept rebooting but I cant find any info on how it chooses what to cache and what not to.

I wonder if it's a "well those files are only touched on boot, so lets kick them out and fill the flash with files x, y and z that are touched a lot more often when the system is in use" thing.