MBP hard drive upgrade Q
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- nikdaum
Hello all,
Have any of you guys upgraded your Macbook Pro hard drives to an aftermarket drive?
I recently upgraded my stock Hitachi drive to a 500GB 7200rpm Western Digital Scorpio Black.
( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Pr… )
Was working great and fast until I noticed that it was parking/unparking its heads every couple seconds when the system was idle.
I spent forever searching on the internet and found out it has to do with how the drive's power management works with OSX. It's not an uncommon problem for after market drives on OSX it seems.
Have any of you guys had this problem?
It seems like all these load cycles will wear out the drive way faster than it should.
I used hdapm to set the drive to never park it's heads, but it seems like a hack.
Any non snarky advice is appreciated.
-N
- orrinward0
If you're upgrading and it's a performance device, get an SSD.
- nikdaum0
Need more space than a solid state can offer at the moment.
- raf0
Scorpio is not the best choice for laptops, I recommend Seagate XT hybrid drives:
- autoflavour0
I have had 3 drive failures over the past 10 years.. they were ALL western digital.
that is all i have to say
- You need to assume every drive will fail and start your backup strategy from there.raf
- I do, but the rest of the drives, which were seagates, never have. the WD all came in mac'sautoflavour
- 3 drives over 10 years? so each drive lasted 3 years? Pretty good results if you ask meVikingKingEleven
- akrok0
^
so they last avg. 3 years and 3 months. then. not so good.- Assuming each drive was $120 with a 3 year life span = a cost of .03¢ a dayVikingKingEleven
- nikdaum0
For anyone curious, I fixed the idle drive heads constantly parking through this utility: http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/
I wish apple would just address this issue though, but it seems to be working fine now. The heads only park when the computer goes to sleep now, rather then when idle.