Macbook Harddrive upgrade

RobH · 17 Jul 2006 at 00:13

I'm planning on ordering my Macbook in the next week or two as well as 2GB of RAM and a 120GB harddrive seperatly. Since I want to replace the 60GB stock hard drive before I install anything important, what is the best way of setting up the new hard drive?

Can I simply pop the new hard drive in and boot the restore DVD and it will set everything up like the original hard drive or would I be better off cloning the existing 60GB harddrive with something like ghost?

Thanks

Beepcake · 17 Jul 2006 at 07:51

Best reinstalling from scratch I would think.. then you can tell it not to install the gigs of crap they preinstall

punky_munky · 17 Jul 2006 at 11:31

By gigs of crap, what exactly do you mean? :confused:

Beepcake · 17 Jul 2006 at 12:09

punky_munky said:
By gigs of crap, what exactly do you mean?

Multiple languages, printer drivers, stuff like that. There's an app called Delocalizer that gets rid of the language stuff.. saves several gigs. If you reinstall yourself you can choose what you do and don't want from the start rather than trying to remove things afterwards.

punky_munky · 17 Jul 2006 at 12:11

Ah, is delocalizer safe for Macbooks? It hasn't been updated for a looong time so I'm a little wary of using it. I think things like drivers are very useful to have onboard as I can simply plug in to any printer and go.

Beepcake · 17 Jul 2006 at 12:31

punky_munky said:
Ah, is delocalizer safe for Macbooks? It hasn't been updated for a looong time so I'm a little wary of using it. I think things like drivers are very useful to have onboard as I can simply plug in to any printer and go.

Any printer? Plug and go? OS X? You're having a laugh?

I ran delocalizer on my macbook with no problems at all.. took a while though

punky_munky · 17 Jul 2006 at 12:47

5 out of 5 so far

Jimathy · 17 Jul 2006 at 14:09

not sure if its the same for the macbook but when apple recently replaced my macbook pro for one with an incorrect hard drive i was told that the hard drive was not a user replaceable part.

so you'd be best to either make sure you keep the original hard drive or order it with a 120gig drive anyway. is voiding your warranty worth the £70 saving?

Doug · 17 Jul 2006 at 14:54

Jimathy said:
not sure if its the same for the macbook

It's not. The HDD on the MacBook is a user servicable part

Beepcake · 17 Jul 2006 at 16:34

Doug said:
It's not. The HDD on the MacBook is a user servicable part

And an extremely easy to replace one at that

blueCAT · 17 Jul 2006 at 19:12

What HDD were you thinking of buying? ...just out of interest

sloth · 17 Jul 2006 at 19:24

I went for a 100gb Fujitsu HDD, £74inc from another retailer. For ram I went for 2 x 1gb of ADATA goodness, which cost £80.

Rams been working perfectly, and the HDD arrives tomorrow. I'm planning to use the old one in a external 2.5" enclosure.

blueCAT · 17 Jul 2006 at 19:46

Ah ok. Thanks.

The 5400 one I assume...Probably a bad idea to put a 7200rpm drive in such a small hot laptop

Beepcake · 17 Jul 2006 at 19:49

blueCAT said:
Ah ok. Thanks.

The 5400 one I assume...Probably a bad idea to put a 7200rpm drive in such a small hot laptop

Quite a few people have, but there's some debate over whether it performs any better.

RobH · 17 Jul 2006 at 22:47

I don't know what brand I'm going with yet but it's likely to be a 120GB 5400RPM because as blueCAT said, the MacBook is already pretty hot and a 7200RPM drive will run hotter than a 5400RPM one. I have seen a few benchmarks and there doesn't look like there is much difference between the two.

As for the RAM, I'm going with Corsair Value Select 2GB for £120, I've seen 2GB of Adata on eBay for less but I'd rather go with a well known brand.

And no, replacing the HDD/RAM on a MacBook is not warrently voiding, Apple state they are user-servicable parts.