First Impressions: 300GB WD in MBP

[sekker]

It's never easy moving to a smaller apartment, or to a computer with a smaller hard drive.

I have a new MBP that came with a stock 150 GB HD. Trouble was, I was coming from a 190GB machine!

In the end, last week my machine became completely flaky and unusable when I unintentionally went below 3GB free HD space. I backed up, archived and deleted 9 GB of older files. The machine spent parts of several days defragmenting the remaining 11 GB of free space, slowly getting better and more responsive.

I took this as a healthy warning as this would have been a disaster had I been working on a deadline. So I just replaced my MBP with a 300 GB ('320') WD drive. Install went great. I even took the time to do a fresh install of Leopard and then used migration assistant to move my apps and files.

What an amazing difference in speed! Feels like a new machine. Granted, having a new OS always seems to refresh my mac, but clearly the clean(ish) hard drive is also contributing nicely.

This $200 upgrade (from OWC, of course!) is as big a difference in speed as going from 2 to 4 GB of RAM. I am very pleased so far.

As usual, YMMV.

[Racer X]

how were you defragmenting it BTW?

[volcs0]

The 320gb drives were selling as externals at Amazon a few days ago, but I think the deal is dead now...

Edit: They were $149...

[sekker]

[quote Racer X]how were you defragmenting it BTW?
OS X does quite a bit of defragmenting in the background, but it's not perfect. I just left the machine on to run overnight.

[Bill in NC]

2.5" 500GB, 9.5mm SATA Samsung ships next month.

Bet it's under $200 by the end of the year.