Old MacBook Pro needs a hard drive

[lesliekirk]

My mobile office workhorse, a MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2008) is in need of what is sounding like a new hard drive. Literally, it's chattering. It originally came with a 200GB hard drive that I upgraded to a 500GB Hitachi HTS725050A9A364 500 GB SATA. I've been thinking about a SSD drive but I'm worried about compatibility issues with the slower link speed of the machine (1.5Gb/s) and being maxed out at 4GB of RAM.

Hopefully someone can suggest an affordable drive replacement.

Many thanks!
Leslie

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Old MacBook Pro needs a hard drive

My similar era mac book uses a 1 TB SSD drive with no apparent issues (other than having to remove the CD drive to fit the SSD as it was an 'old school SSD drive' (not only big, but you don't want to know how much the SSD cost back in 2010 :) )

[lesliekirk]

Re: Old MacBook Pro needs a hard drive

I think you and I may have the same machine. I don't think I can afford to go 1TB even in today's prices. I did see a SSHD that caught my eye and calls itself "backwards compatible" - it's an affordable 1TD drive.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Old MacBook Pro needs a hard drive

well, for a travel machine, a 250/500 GB drive would be enough no? (Just saw a 500 at tigerdirect for like $120)

[lesliekirk]

Re: Old MacBook Pro needs a hard drive

That's my thinking too, I really don't need more than 500GB

[lesliekirk]

So the saga continues, the laptop doesn't "need" a new hard drive, new right side fan, yes, hard drive no. It turns out that the hard drive in my iMac was failing. Since it was under Apple Care, I dropped it off for repair before I went out of town. I was advised it would "only" take 3-5 days, so I figured I'd be picking it up when we got back. Since I hadn't gotten any sort of update from Apple or the Apple Store I left it at, I figured I'd better call. Of course, the number to the local store automatically transferred me to Apple Support. They didn't have any sort of status on it either, so the tech had to call the local store. Seems that the replacement of the hard drive went without any problem, but an "issue" came up with the display. Hmmmmm, yeah. So the local Apple techs had to order the part(s). I asked for the new ETA, the Apple Support guy forgot to ask for that and had to call the local store back. He tells me if I don't get any sort of update by Saturday to call them back. So I get off the phone and the first thing my husband tells me - "your next machine will be a PC" - LOL

[lesliekirk]

Thought I'd update this a bit. I did install a new SSD drive. I had the zap the PRAM after installing the drive - getting from the gray start up screen to the apple was painfully slow. I haven't put the machine through all of it's paces but have used it. I noticed that the machine seems to have more CPU usage which heats it up. Not good when I have one of the fans failing. Then, after the fact, this link came in from the Mac Users group I subscribe to http://www.macattorney.com/sd.html with all of the reason a Mac could be slower. Interestingly enough, that machine has both the Sophos Antivirus Home Edition (recommended to me by David - sorry David) and has a connection to Dropbox. Guess I need to ask the author what he recommends for Antivirus. I've discovered that Sophos is really good at quarantining any infected files that I may download from a WordPress site I might be working on.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

You can drop to a command prompt and run top to see which apps are consuming cpu. The letter q quits out of it. The two useful sorting options for top are:

top -o cpu
top -o time

The first one refreshes every three seconds and sorts by who's using the most cpu at that given point in time. The second one sorts by total cpu time consumed. On my computer Sophos uses next to no cpu unless I'm doing something like an FTP transfer and a large number of files are being created, and that's when it should use a lot of cpu since it has to scan them. Over the 28 dyas my computer has been online, the biggest cpu hogs are vmware fusion at 229 hours of cpu time and Google Chrome, which if you add up all the processes, it's consumed 299 hours of cpu.