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Posted on Sep 14, 2009 - 1:15am by John P. in Computing, Tutorials
I’ve been doing a lot of photography with my Canon 5D Mark II 21MP camera, and each image taken in RAW format is about 25MB! So, needless to say, I’ve been using up a whole lot of hard drive space. Even though I upgraded my MacBook Pro to a 500GB drive a month ago, it’s only got less than 100GB left on it. So, I went looking for MORE!
Well, it turns out that Seagate is making a 640GB drive which will actually fit in a standard laptop. While there are a couple of other 2.5″ drives that are larger, they are also thicker and won’t work in most notebooks. So, the Seagate was what I wanted! Only problem – they aren’t selling it yet!
Doah! Well, no matter. Because I found out that I could buy a Seagate FreeAgent Go 640 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive
Well, guess what. It worked! And now I’m posting this article from the world’s first laptop computer with a 640GB hard drive! Of course, that happens to be my 17″ MacBook Pro. Oh, and if you read along I’ll show you how you can do it too!
After reading the review of the hard drive over on The Penguin Trail, here is the summary they gave:
Performance cannot match a 7200RPM notebook drive in many tasks, but the Seagate 640GB is no slouch. It can perform as fast or faster than lower density 7200RPM drives in streaming and other sequential tasks. Keep this drive defragmented and you can expect good all around performance. Of course, on top of that is huge storage capacity.
This left me wondering if getting the new bigger hard drive might actually perform as well as my smaller, faster turning 500GB drive. So, before I pulled out my old drive, I ran a series of tests on it with the help of AJA System Test. The following are screen captures from the tests along with a summary at the end if you’d like to skip ahead.
This is the drive that was in my machine, and it was only about a month old.
NOTE! Do you see how the performance of the 7,200 RPM drive drops off dramatically when dealing with large file sizes? This surprised me so much I ran the test three times! As you’ll see from the testing below, for some reason on large files this drive is actually slower than the 5,400 RPM drive that replaced it. And the Firewire G-Drive is just as fast even though it’s external! Amazing, unexpected, and really unforgivable.
These are the results of the new drive after it was installed in my machine. How exactly did I do that you may ask? Well, I simply used the freeware app SuperDuper! to clone my existing hard drive onto the external USB drive. Then I disassembled the USB case and took the hard drive out to install in my machine.
Here is a little video of the disassembly of the USB drive that I did:
And you can do a search on Google to learn how to physically upgrade the hard drive in your MacBook Pro. If you’ve got a unibody it is very, very easy. If you’ve got the old style, you’re going to need a chainsaw. (I hope they fired the guy who designed the old ones!)
Just for comparison’s sake, I also ran the tests on a G-Drive which is my portable that I put video files on. Turns out it’s smokin fast!
And this is how the new drive performed when it was still in it’s original USB container. It seems that the limitations of the USB interface ensured that this drive doesn’t even reach half it’s potential. But I can’t wait to see what happens when they begin offering it with a Firewire 800 port. I would hope that it performs like the G-Drive, which will make for huge, fast, and compact mass storage on the go.
Well, I must say that I didn’t know exactly what to expect when comparing the new 5,400 RPM drive to the 7,200 RPM drive, but I was pretty sure that the faster drive was going to run circles around the slower one. But apparently that is not always the case!
As you can see, the new drive performed the fastest in the Sweep File Sizes test, and even more shockingly, the G-Drive external hard drive even out performed the 7200 RPM drive mounted internally in the machine! By the way, I ran those tests multiple times to make sure it wasn’t an anomaly, and the computer was doing nothing else at the time.
Just to wrap up a couple other items:
Anyway, I guess the final report is that this definitely works. So you just have to make a decision… do you need the most hard drive space that money can currently buy? Or are you good with what you’ve got?
Cheers!
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(ugh) Too many stats for a Monday morning — head…spinning…must rest!
Agreed!
WOW 640 GB is just dream.. the product is really amazing
Can we have all that in lay mans terms?
John P: I want you to go in that bag, and find my Laptop.
Pumpkin: Which one is it?
John P: It’s the one that says Bad Motherfucker
its amazing, great Tutorial
So I’m dying to put this drive in my Macbook Pro, but mine’s only a 15″ – it’s not the current model, it’s about 2 years old. Any thoughts about whether it’ll fit, or should I just suck it up and get a 500GB?
Thanks much!
Amanda
Amanda, I’m 99.9% certain it will fit. It’s the exact same size as all of the other laptop hard drives. My 17″ MBP is a couple years old and it went right in. You should have no problem whatsoever if you are ok with opening one of the cases up like I showed you.
John P.
Just saw your video on Viddler – thanks so so so so so much!
John–
I’m a bit of a newb, but pretty capable. I have a question or two that might seem obvious to you, but would be so appreciative if you could answer.
I got the 640 Freeagent Go drive in my hot little hands – yay! And I found someone whom I can pay a reasonable rate to physically swap the drives for me. However, I can’t find anyone who can promise to turn it around in less than 24 hours mostly b/c transferring the data is the big time suck. So I want to set up the drive and dupe the data myself, so that way I’m only hiring the outsider to do the labor, which hopefully they can turn around quickly.
Can you just tell me if this sounds like the right plan of action:
1) install OSX on the new drive.
2) dupe my current hard drive – I have copy of Super-Duper and was planning to use that.
Is it really that simple? Or is there some extra step to take or mistake to avoid that might seem obvious to you but not to someone who’s never done this by themselves before?
Thank you in advance for any help you can give me.
Amanda
Actually Amanda, it’s simpler than that.
You don’t need to bother installing OSX on the drive because if you dupe it with SuperDuper it will copy your complete drive, OSX and all! So just unplug the old drive and put the new one in after using SuperDuper.
This is a very low risk operation as far as upgrades are concerned, because at the end of the day, you still have your old hard drive which has all of your data safe and sound on it. You can always put it back in!
So do the swap yourself, and after you change the drives, but before you reassemble your laptop, boot it up and make sure it’s working. After you see the OS boot screen, you can power it down and put it together.
Cheers,
John P.