Hi all

I am told to change my own Macbook HDD. I just want to check whether anyone has done it before?

Is it okay for me to get any internal HDD as long as it is 2.5" and 9.5mm for my macbook 13"?

Please advise. I got a quotation that it will cost me Au$300 for just a 120GB HDD at the service centre exclude service charge. So I need advise from all of you as I am trying to save some money and do it on my own as I have found the website with instruction to do it. But I wan to be sure of that I can make use of any HDD.

Thank you.

Any 9.5mm 2.5" drive which is SATA. You can pick up 500GB drives off ebay for $200 now.

Thanks Mission Man. I will go take a look. Do you have the exact model?

By the way, after fixing the HDD, I just need to used the discs provided to install Mac OS right?

buy an external caddy while you are there for another 30 or so bucks and use carbon copy cloner to copy your machine to the new hdd

Just another question, what is the differences between a SATA and SATA II ?

I do not want to get a wrong one.

Difference is not important... SATAII and SATA both use the same data cables. You'll only find SATAII drives anyways, and if they have SATA then they probably mean SATAII anyways.

For differences, consult google (or wikipedia).

Thank you, everyone. I am off to source for one HDD within my budget.

Hi guys,
so just re-iterating (please forgive me). If I bought an external 320gb HDD, used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my existing 120gb to it, I could then just swap the drives and the new one would boot flawlessly? Will this work with a USB external drive?
the 320gb drives are $149 at officeworks so I figure I might as well get one of those and have an enclosure to put the 120gb drive into.

Mitty, it all depends on whether or not that $149 drive can be removed from the enclosure.

Secondly, yes what you've laid out there should work. I don't think you can boot from a USB external drive...but you can certainly clone to it and then swap them over.

You can definitely boot from an external USB drive on a macbook, PPC machines is a different story though. I did pretty much what you outlined above Mitty, the external enclosure I used was a Seagate Freagent Go (which is SATA inside) and it worked without a hitch. CCC took a while to clone the data on the original drive, I think it was about 2.5 hours to clone nearly 80GB.
- Berwyck

Samsung 500GB 8MB 2.5 SATA Hard Drive For PS3 LAPTOP Ne - eBay PlayStation 3, Sony, Systems, Video Games. (end time 21-Oct-08 12:23:02 AEST)

PCMeal has always been pretty good on ebay. I've bought stuff from them before.

Thanks guys. One more question (sorry!). I've found a Western Digital Elements drive for $129 that's 320gb. I can't seem to find a) if it's SATA inside, and b) what speed the drive is? I've done a google and some posts seem to suggest is 7200rpm. Is this a good idea or should I stick with 5400rpm? As $129 seems like a good deal for an external drive

7200rpm should be no issue. There should be no/negligible extra power drain on the battery and heat generated. If it is SATA that is a good price (provided you can get in easily), I paid $110 for my 320GB.
- Berwyck