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+--- Thread: New Hitachi HD and AP Express "N" Card Transplant in Old MBP Went Great (/showthread.php?tid=55840)
New Hitachi HD and AP Express "N" Card Transplant in Old MBP Went Great - Chupa Chupa - 05-31-2008
The 7K200 Hitachi (200MB, 7200RPM) HD I bought from our forum sponsor came in as planned yesterday. Here are a few observations for those thinking about cracking open there late model MBP for upgrades:
1) Compared to the TiBook and AlBook, the MBP case is super easy to open. No spudger/black stick is needed to pop the front side. I just gently pried it open with my finger tips. Do be gentle or you WILL bend the case.
2) The air hole on the Hitachi drive is exactly where the MBP's SATA flex-cable wants to sit. This freaked me out at first, but after some research found out this was OK because the cable only sits over the hole, which is indented in the HD case. Apple uses this same Hitachi drive and apparently it's not different on the Apple OEM drives.
3) My original shipping drive is a 100GB Seagate 7200RPM (don't recall the model number off hand). So my comparison is between a 7200RPM and a 7200RPM.
a) Battery life (on my "custom" setting) seems to have gone down from a max of 2:30 to now 2:17. This is a fairly new battery, having been replaced last fall. My custom setting is for the HD to never to go sleep and screen brightness at half brightness.
b) Speed is impressive. Much faster feeling than the Seagate. To be fair, my Seagate only had 20GB of free space left (out of 80GB total on the Mac partition....10GB were dedicated to Boot Camp). I'm sure that alone created a bottleneck.
c) The Hitachi is a tad noisier than the Seagate. You can hear a very light but constant "wrrrr" that was not as present with the Seagate. It's not obtrusive enough to bother me and quickly turns to background noise when I get working.
d) A few months ago when CompUSA was closing down I bought a CompUSA brand SATA 2.5" USB2/SATA enclosure for cheap. I popped in my old Seagate in it with the idea of cloning it to the new drive. I don't know if the early MBPs can't boot from USB, but mine certainly would not, at least not with this case (which is as crappy as you can get, I admit). I had to run out and buy a FW enclosure. Good old FW worked as expected. Booted externally from the Seagate and cloned to new drive and was up in about 30 min. I then cloned the Boot Camp partition using WinClone, which also went perfectly.
4) After I cracked open my MBP I thought why not replace the old "g" airport card w/ a new "n" card. (I had seen this unofficial upgrade on a MacWorld vodcast -- available on iTunes if you want visual instructions). I took trips to three different Apple Stores to get one (long story, and not complimentary to some Apple Store employees) but I finally got one. The model number I bought is MB363Z/A, but the older models work as well. It was $45 after tax and works great. Fantastic upgrade for the money. I don't have the ability to test out the "n" speeds yet, but the MBP does recognize it as an "N" card.
If you do install one of these cards in your MBP be aware that not only does Apple not support this card in the MBP, they specifically state using it a MBP will void your MBP warranty. My MBP is long out of warranty so not an issue for me.
I'm excited with my upgrades as it was a cheap way to extend my MBPs usability for some time to come (or at least another year and half). In the meantime I may use the money saved up for a new MBP to buy a Version 2.0 MBA whenever that comes out if the specs bump up to something more usable long term.
Re: New Hitachi HD and AP Express "N" Card Transplant in Old MBP Went Great - hal - 05-31-2008
on point d) - I'm pretty sure that USB does not provide enough juice to mount ANY 7200rpm drive.
Re: New Hitachi HD and AP Express "N" Card Transplant in Old MBP Went Great - Chupa Chupa - 06-01-2008
No the old Seagate drive mounted fine in the CUSA box on my other machines (I tested that out), it just wouldn't boot on the MBP. I don't know how much juice the Seagate required, but it's only a .5w difference between comparable 5400 and 7200 Hitatchi drives. In fact Hitachi markets a 7200 external USB 2.0.
Re: New Hitachi HD and AP Express "N" Card Transplant in Old MBP Went Great - JoeH - 06-01-2008
Well, given that a standard USB port - 1.1 or 2 - only supplies 2.5 W of 5 V power, 0.5 W is significant. Also, are you quoting the run time power draw, spin up power needed is higher. You might have gotten it to work with one of the USB power "Y" cables.
As for the MBP's USB ports, supposedly they may supply a bit more than the USB spec calls for. But I have not been able to find any documentation from Apple on how much yet. I have run across some reports that one USB port is better at providing a higher power level than the other. Apple is better at giving the Firewire power amount available, 7 or 8 W the last time I checked.