Hard Drive Upgrade Pain and Warning.
Well,
I have recently upgraded my HD to a Western Digital 500GB (WD5000BEVT) and although it is running ok I have noticed a few issues:
-Very brief lag (1 - 2secs) on most things. For example, right click on an item to bring up a menu will result in spinning wheel for a few moments and then the menu.
-At time of lag/freeze a noticeable sound of the HD spinning up before the action will be performed
Computer boot up and shutdown time seems seem longer than with pervious "official" HD
-I also noticed when I was transferring all my music (43GB) onto the computer the system's responsiveness while using applications was much faster.
Anyone who has had these issues and solved it is more than welcome to comment (although not with the Hdapm solution as 1: I have tried this and couldn't get it to work and 2: I would rather like a permanent fix that is not software dependant) and I though I would post to warn others there is a compatibility issue with this drive. I am trying to get in contact with WD but still waiting to hear back. I do not think this a faulty drive as many other people are having the same problem with other WD hard drives all from the Scorpio Blue/Black line.
Now after all this fuss I am thinking of replacing the HD with another different 500GB. I would like to know what the official apple 500GB 2.5 SATA drive is that they use in the Macbook Pro's but have not been able to find out via the internet and was wondering if anyone here has any info? Also do apple change the firmware of the drives they use to make them work better with Apple notebooks / OSX and is this why they have an apple logo on the drives? Finally is it possible to purchase the "official" drives anywhere and is it really worth doing this?
Sorry for the long rant and I look forward to hearing back from you.
Regards,
BTD
I have a 15" MacBook Pro from 2007. Quick Specs: 2.2/2GB/10.5.8
I recently upgraded the 120 GB hard drive to the Western Digital 500GB (WD5000BEVT)
The drive appears to work fine, but there was a massive performance issue: lots of beachballs and lags in any task that required disk access. sequential read/write (copying big files) seemed to be ok. My system was very slow.
the problem was best described here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2292861
From a few other posts on this topic:
Reliable and rugged - WD's ShockGuard technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks. WD's SecurePark™ parks the
recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down, and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk >surface resulting in improved long term reliability due to less head wear, and improved non-operational shock tolerance.
Using drives with a built in equivalent of the MacBooks Sudden Motion Sensor can cause problems. You may want to try to disable the Sudden Motion Sensor in your MacBook and see if that helps:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1934
My Experience:
Disabling Sudden Motion Sensor, then resetting the PRAM (press command-option-P-R at startup) helped a huge amount. This is noticeable as a user, but also through XBench:
Before disabling sms: XBench score of 21.73. After disabling sms AND resetting PRAM: 119.88. I just did this a few hours ago, but I think that it fixed the problem.
hdapm seems to do nothing to help this problem, but there might be a different problem with 3rd party hard drives in newer MacBook Pros. There seems to be some confusion in Apple's message boards about this.
Message was edited by: areadan
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