Speed up your Apple MacBook Pro - Twice as fast for less than $100

One of the constant annoyances for photographers in the digital age is having enough speedy storage for all of your images. Shooting RAW, as I mostly do, adds to the need for more storage. With laptops being as good as they are most of my work is now done on a newer 2.4Ghz Apple MacBook Pro. I got one a few generations back that still has the matte screen. I absolutely HATE that the new Apple MacBook Pros are glossy only. As someone accurately wondered on SportsShooter.com Does Apple Hate Photographers?  It makes me wonder sometimes too.

So I was looking for a way to breath a little new life into my laptop. My machine came with a 160Gb drive from Apple. It was the slowest part of my whole system and I knew it. At the time, a few years ago, fast 2.5" laptop drives were both expensive and sucked more power than the OEM drives that shipped with it. In the last few months I've really noticed the prices dropping. After some searching online looking at benchmarks I decided on a Western Digital Scorpio 320Gb hard drive. There are two models of this drive the Blue version (that I went with) has a 5,400 rpm spindle and the Black version runs at 7,200 rpm. Unfortunately I found this out after I ordered mine but I am happy with the results none the less. I figure that the 5,400 rpm drive will run quieter and use less juice but not having tested both of them back to back this is just a guess.

Coolmax external eSATA / USB enclosure (left) OEM drive (right)

My first thought was to put the new drive in an external enclosure saving me the hassle of opening up my laptop and moving all my data over. Once I tested the two drives I realized if I replace the internal drive with the Western Digital Scorpio drive it will be twice as fast and have twice the storage space. For less than $100 with shipping and tax that was a no-brainer.

testing of original drive in MacBook Pro

QuickBench(TM) 4.0 Test Results: OEM Fujitsu 160Gb Drive
Transfer Size        Extended Read      Extended Write
 20 MBytes           22.544 MB/Sec      22.428 MB/Sec
 30 MBytes           22.951 MB/Sec      19.968 MB/Sec
 40 MBytes           23.547 MB/Sec      22.936 MB/Sec
 50 MBytes           22.878 MB/Sec      22.542 MB/Sec
 60 MBytes           22.912 MB/Sec      22.719 MB/Sec
 70 MBytes           23.258 MB/Sec      23.222 MB/Sec
 80 MBytes           22.902 MB/Sec      22.714 MB/Sec
 90 MBytes           23.171 MB/Sec      23.078 MB/Sec
100 MBytes           23.134 MB/Sec      22.328 MB/Sec
Extended Ave         23.033 MB/Sec      22.437 MB/Sec

New WD Scorpio drive in MacBook Pro aprox 55Mb/sec

QuickBench(TM) 4.0 Test Results: Western Digital Scorpio 320Gb drive
Transfer Size        Extended Read      Extended Write
 20 MBytes           54.742 MB/Sec      54.961 MB/Sec
 30 MBytes           54.651 MB/Sec      54.637 MB/Sec
 40 MBytes           55.782 MB/Sec      55.763 MB/Sec
 50 MBytes           56.385 MB/Sec      56.390 MB/Sec
 60 MBytes           56.351 MB/Sec      47.012 MB/Sec
 70 MBytes           57.485 MB/Sec      56.959 MB/Sec
 80 MBytes           56.413 MB/Sec      56.435 MB/Sec
 90 MBytes           55.575 MB/Sec      55.519 MB/Sec
100 MBytes           56.323 MB/Sec      56.366 MB/Sec
Extended Ave         55.967 MB/Sec      54.894 MB/Sec

To make the replacement I recommend the following things...

• order a fast SATA 2.5" laptop drive (for Intel laptops)
• order an external USB, eSATA or Firewire case for your old drive
• use Carbon Copy Cloner to move your data over to the new drive
• read the notes on how to clone a drive with Carbon Copy Cloner
• watch the video on how to open up your Mac at OWC (Other World Computing)
• have a very small #0 Phillips and a Torx #6 screwdriver handy
• a free hour or more to do the surgery

Once you have the things together it goes pretty straight forward. Make sure you well organized and don't loose any of those screws because Mendards and Home Depot are not going to have them.

I ordered my WD Scorpio drive at Tiger Direct but OWC (www.macsales.com) had almost the same prices and they are great to do business with. They know the Mac extremely well and you can talk to a real person with a Midwestern accent on the phone with any questions you might have. They also have some of the best external firewire cases for both laptops and desktops around. They cost more because they good good chipsets (Oxford).  I am very happy with my external USB/FW 800 2.5" laptop drive from them. I was looking for an external 2.5" enclosure with eSATA and OWC did not have any but Tiger Direct did.

So if you can find an extra $100, a spare hour or more and the cajones to open up your laptop, I would recommend swaping out your current laptop hard drive.

NOTE: for the best performance with an external drive on the Intel Apple MacBook Pro, the eSATA interface is the way to go. With an external 3.5" drive and an eSATA cardbus adapter you can easily obtain 80Mb/sec read/write with a single drive. The downside is that it is cumbersome and an external eSATA drive needs power where a USB and Firewire drive can be bus powered. Bus powered means that one cable can both power your drive (via your laptop battery) and provide the data as well. An eSATA connection is data only so you will need to power your external drive. There are some clever options for that which I will discuss later in this site.

Update on Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 07:27PM by David Ditzler

I just read this on another blog so I thought I would post it here. I have had this installed for a few days and have not noticed a problem but I have not used it "on the road yet". Maybe there is a better choice for mobile drive.

[http://www.macspecialist.org/content/articles/macbook_pro_owners_beware/]

"A light bulb then went off… we started to associate the panics with movement. Then it hit us like 3 tons of bowling balls, the Scorpio has built-in shock protection. The ShockGuard technology that WD employs is interfering with the Macs own head parking technology. We placed another call into Other World and returned the second Scorpio in exchange for the slightly more expensive Seagate Momentus (which does not have built-in shock protection). After installing the Momentus and cloning over the now tired image, we haven’t had a single kernal panic. \\ All that said, if you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, DO NOT upgrade to the WD Scorpio line of hard drives. They are definitely fine drives, just not fine for MacBook/Pro owners."

Comments

[Adam Koch]

Thanks Dave, you always have great tech advice and seem to know everything before everyone else does. I have a 17" Macbook Pro 2.4 I bought just at the end of last year. I love it for the most part but with the 7200rpm its crazy loud and hot and has no storage space on it. I will probably go the same rout as you now. Sick of always having to plug in a slow usb mini drive... so damn slow and more shit to deal with.

thanks again.

adam koch