Alright guys, I'm thinking about upgrading the hard drive in my 2010 MacBook Pro 13, giving myself 2 options. 1) Direct replacement: Replace original 320gb hard drive with a Seagate Momentus XT 750gb (~$150). 2) Take out the DVD Optical Drive, replace it with a hard drive/SSD cradle, install a 120-180gb SSD ($100-$150) as the boot drive and application, keep the 320gb hard drive in the original spot for storage and stuff. My concern is with 2 drives in the machine, I'm not sure how it will boot up and how I will deal with dual boot (Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7 Professional). I'm looking for storage and speed improvement for the hard drive, but not sure which route to go. If you do recommend me to go to dual drive (SSD + HDD), tell me which SSD might be a good choice. I'm currently looking at Intel 330 Series, Samsung 830, and OCZ Vertex 3 since it's the cheapest/gb I rarely use the DVD/optical drive that's why I'm considering taking it out and putting another hard drive. But the drive might come in handy when I actually need it, so I'm not really sure at this moment.
[video=youtube;Neff9scaCCI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Neff9scaCCI[/video] throw that old pos away or sell its useless now
No thanks. Not ready to invest $2000 on a laptop, don't really need i7 or the nvidia 650m. The current MacBook Pro have Intel Core 2 Duo @2.66GHz + Nvidia 320m + 8gb ram, good enough for me.
Buy a 120GB SSD, replace the current HDD with it. Put your old HDD into the Optical Bay HDD Cradle. This would be an improvement in terms of Boot Up speed. There is a downside on this configuration, I don't know what you are planning to store on the normal HDD, but for example me, I store lots of photos. So, if I install Photoshop on the fast SSD it allows me to open the program quickly, but if the photos themselves are on the normal HDD then it will still be slow in loading. If you want speed and storage you will need to buy either a large SSD which still cost a fortune (talking about 480GB+). Or you use 2 smaller SSD drives. I replaced my 250GB stock HDD from the late 2011 13"MacBookPro with an 256GB OCZ Vertex 4, Speed and storage space are amazing. I bought a second SSD but unfortunately the Optical Bay only allows max SATAII, since the Vertex4 has SATAIII it won't work =(
Does not allow you to install OS from external USB DVD.. I ended up buying a Samsung 830 128gb SSD back in mid-August. Didn't buy an optical bay cradle though. I think I can live with 128gb for now, 60gb OS X and 60gb Windows 7. I don't really store anything on my laptops, usually all the stuff goes to an external HDD or a 32gb+ flash drive. All I have is programs + maybe some temporary documents that I haven't moved to the flash drive. If I do need more storage, I think I will get a 256gb SSD and replace the optical drive with it. Mine MBP is SATA II only so no difference with either ports.
