What do specs to i have to meet for a new macbook HDD?

[Star Destroyer]

Hello,

I have a CoreDuo 1.83 macbook, 1GB, 60GB Hdd, i was looking to buy more RAM and a bigger HDD for this holiday season.

The RAM i will purchase from Crucial but the HDD i have been looking and i want to know what exactly i need.

do i need ATA ? SATA ? (or even ATA-100 or SATA-150?) these are what is confusing me. I know it needs to be a 2.5" HDD but then i started seeing these extra little things and i dont want to buy the wrong one.

I was hoping to get around a 120-160GB (or more if its cheap, <200$)
Can anyone reccomend some HDD's or possible just the criteria a new one would need to meet to work in my macbook?

(Side note: does anyone know the max size HDD my macbook would recognize? is it 320? or so )

Thanks all !

 

[GfulDedFan]

You need SATA. You can get one as big as you want to but I think the largest Notebook drives are 320GB right now. I bought mine at MCE.

I put in a 120GB 7200 rpm and I love it. It's fast and quiet and I can't say it's been a heat or battery life problem.

Mine's a Seagate but any brand should work as long as it's 2.5" SATA but there is a slight height restriction for MacBooks. You should also get an enclosure for the old drive so you can keep it around for backups or whatever.

 

[Airforce]

You need SATA. You can get one as big as you want to but I think the largest Notebook drives are 320GB right now.

250GB

 

[Star Destroyer]

Okay so just any SATA drive would work.. But can would i really be able to see a speed increase with a 7200rpm drive from my stock macbook drive? I will be using my comp for some photoshop, web browsing, and i plan to use bootcamp to install ArcGIS and do work on that. Would the rpm change make a difference worth the extra money ?


I have been looking and thus far i have found these two:
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3296045&CatId=2676
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3331696&CatId=2676


but cannot decide what would be better, the 16mb buffer or the extra 20GB of storage... The rest seems as if it would be pretty negligible. However, i dont really understand what the difference would be from the SATA in the hitachi vs. the SATA-300 in the Seagate, would that make the difference?

 

[GfulDedFan]

However, i dont really understand what the difference would be from the SATA in the hitachi vs. the SATA-300 in the Seagate, would that make the difference?

Well....SATA I (150) and SATA II (300) are different and your MacBook takes SATA I. The SATA II is backwards compatible so really either will work.

As far as the speed bump of a 7200 rpm vs say a 5400 rpm......not really as big a bump as going from 1GB of RAM to 2GB which is what I assume you were going to do. It just accesses your HD faster somewhat but using RAM is much faster than spinning your disk. Also, having extra room and not filling up the darn thing to capacity helps too. Really, nothing beats a faster processor but it looks like you and I are stuck with our first gen MB's while the rest of the ******s in here speed along with their SR speed demons. (do you detect a hint of jealousy yet)

Hope this helps -GDF