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Yet Another New Hard Drive

As regular readers may have noticed by now, I have a tendency to shoehorn the highest capacity hard drives into my MacBook Pro as soon as they're available. So I was pretty psyched in March when Samsung announced that their standard height (9.5mm) 500GB notebook hard drive was shipping. But apparently they were talking outta their ass cause even now, no one has actually seen the damn thing. Unless apparently you live in France.

But, late last week, our IT guy pointed out this link to me where a Brit actually went and installed the thicker (12.5mm) Hitachi 500GB notebook hard drive into his 15" MBP. So, being the fearless, cutting-edge techie that I am, I got one too. And I also picked up an external Firewire 800/Firewire 400/USB2/eSATA case for the ol' 320GB drive that was soon to be no longer numero uno. Actually it's a good idea anyway to pick up at least one external drive case that supports Firewire because the transfer speeds just crushes USB2. Saves a lot of time when having to clone hundreds of gigs worth of data between drives so the price premium is worth it over the super cheapo USB2 only cases.

So late last night I cloned my existing drive using Carbon Copy Cloner into the new 500GB and this morning I swapped the drives. The only difference between what I did during the install and what the Brit did is I didn't have to move the remote sensor and catch light leads to the side. I left them on top. Most likely because I didn't use the rubber band strips on the bottom like he did (I just put in a layer of plastic). I wasn't worried about padding on the bottom because with the extra height of this drive it's pretty much an exact fit so no worries about vertical movement. The layer of plastic I put down was just to prevent the hard drive from sitting directly on the metal bottom casing.

But everything actually worked without a hitch and I was up and running in minutes. Only issue is I have to reinstall my Windows partition because I don't think CCC can clone Windows partitions (I may be wrong since I didn't actually try it). But at least I have over 100GB+ of free space again after being down to about 7GB on my 320GB drive. I may still wind up getting the Samsung anyway (when they finally decide to sell it in the US) to use as a main backup where it'll be a direct clone of this Hitachi so in case of catastrophic failure I can just quickly swap and be back in action.

Still not ready to swap out my optical drive for another hard drive though.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on May 16, 2008 11:36 AM.

The previous post in this blog was Minor Site Changes.

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