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New MacBook Pros and MacBooks launched

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
I'll cross the "jumper" bridge when I get to it. The OWC enclosure I assume from the picture will hold one drive. Dumb question but why doesn't seagate sell the drive with an enclosure?

OK so I get the most retro digital camera possibly made and it turns me into a total tech geek on the other end. What's wrong with this picture? :grin:

Because we love you. :thumbs::thumbs::thumbs:
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Dumb question but why doesn't seagate sell the drive with an enclosure?
They do, but the box sucks :D This way, you get a really great box AND get to choose the drive you want in it. Oh, and speaking of drive choice, the WD 1TB "Green" drive is similarly priced to the Seagate, but runs cooler and uses less power. It runs at either 5400 or 7200 RPM as needed, sleeps itself when possible, but can start slower since if it is sleeping it needs a few seconds to wake up. I use these drives as my back-up drives as they're silent, cool and energy efficient. And no jumper to pull on these :)

PS: You were a tech geek long before you went retro

:D :D :D
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Looks like we need to go into a computer module in Carmel and get into more detail. Now if you folks want me to put all this stuff together for you i can do that also. I really am a geek just don't tell my wife. She drives me nuts now.
 

jlm

Workshop Member
if i want to soup up a macbook pro and put in the 200G/ 7200 rpm drive, how is that done as it will be the boot drive?
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
Piece of cake.
Time machine what you have.
Take out 22 screws, put in the new drive, put back 22 screws. (need a P00 and a Torkx number 6)
install leopard from installation disk and restore from time machine backup (option on installation)
Install latest updates.
enjoy
-bob
 

LJL

New member
if i want to soup up a macbook pro and put in the 200G/ 7200 rpm drive, how is that done as it will be the boot drive?
John,
Basically, you first clone the existing internal drive. (There is great software for doing this. I use SuperDuper and it does and excellent job.) You will need either a small SATA capable laptop drive case, or just the bare drive connector to accomplish this. OWC (Macsales.com) sells both. The case is nice, as then you have a place for the drive you remove from the laptop to become a portable external drive for back-up or whatever.

You would then pull the drive from the MBP and replace it with the cloned version. Reassemble and you are good to go. OWC has online video tutorials that show you exactly how to do this. It is not hard, but there area about 21 screws that need to be taken out to accomplish the entire replacement. Not difficult, but one must take care not to misplace things. You will NOT have a problem doing this, given your present skill sets ;)

LJ
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Now take the old drive and buy a Firewire 800 2.5 laptop enclosure and bingo you have a nice travel hard drive for images and such to back you up.
 

jlm

Workshop Member
sounds piece o' cake; especially since this is Son's old laptop and i have nada on it yet, my wife has leopard update for me. so a new drive, bump the ram to 4gig, boot up with the leopard install disc and go to town, eh?
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Let's see if i can explain these drives and what they are good for.


E-Sata . i will just run my mouth and see what comes out here. Hopefully it will help. E-sata is a way to extend hard drives to your Mac pro or Laptop. How it works with a desktop or more the point a Mac pro. There are two E-Sata points or connections on the Motherboard and what you can do is extend them out to the rear of the box in one of the PCI slots. On the laptop there is a E-Sata Express card that you can do the same thing. Usually these are 2 E-Sata ports that you can use and hook up to E-Sata Connections or 2 hard drives. Although you can run a complete Raid E-sata setup also which is a little more involved.

No the benefits of E-sata are they run as fast as any internal drive given the same speed (RPM) and cache. So if you main hard drive is a 7200 32mg cache inside a E-sata drive with the same drive will perform identical. This basically extends you Mac pro 4 drive setup into 2 more drives that run the same. Pretty cool. Now a laptop can achieve the same results and actually better because a 2.5 Hard drive for notebooks is limited to 200 gb to 320 gb and 7200 rpm but only a 16mg cache. You can do a lot better with a 3.5 drive and get 1TB 7200 and 32mg cache. So for the laptop user this is a big plus you can add basically 2 more internal drives basically even though they sit outside the laptop.

Okay obviously you can see the benefits here. More hard drives that run essential as fast as any internal or better. That is the good part. Now the bad

These are not hot swappable like a Firewire drive. There like internals and must be turned on before you power up either your laptop or Mac pro. So these must be on or they will not be seen. So there best for storage of raw files or Final files and stuff like this for travel or laptops they are best to be left at home when you go and don't have to depend on them to have you present shooting files or anything like that. Think of the E sata boxes as the stay at home variety.

Firewire 800. The One nice thing about Mac is firewire 800. Now there are many benefits to Firewire . One is simply this you have one port onthe laptop but you can daisy chain as many Firewire 800 drives as you want or need. Folks basically you can build a whole backup system from one port on your desktop or laptop. They are also hot swappable too. so you can disconnect and go. The other nice thing about Firwire also is drive size you can use notebook drives in enclosures for a small travel unit or again use desktop 3.5 drives inside a firewire 800 enclosure and again you have options of having like a 5 bay Firewire 800 station of drives and dedicate each drive to a certain task. Of course there is Firewire 400 and USB which i would like to say there good for Mice, keyboards, card readers and such and the Firwire 800 is the storage units for speed .


Now there are My books , La cie and all kinds of off the shelf drives you can buy and be ready in 2 minutes by just hooking them up. My issue with a lot of these units is they don't always put the fastest drives in there so i build them with ready available enclosures and buy my own drives. You save some money and get faster drives. not such a bad deal. Now we must remember another issue E -sata and most 3.5 ( desktop drives) firewire 800 drives will need AC power. But the small laptop 2.5 drives are usually bus powered which make them great for travel and laptops and I use them a lot to move files between computers.

Now the trick is finding out how you like to work and store stuff. I've touched on this a couple times in this thread along with other folks also. What I hoping this long drawn out post is give you a better understanding of what E-Sata Is and what Firewire 800 is and what there limitations and benefits are.

Now you need to sit down and get your primary system be it desktop or laptop and get setup properly so when you do run out the door with your laptop you can come back and fill up you main setup with your images. For laptop only folks the same thing you want to keep your laptop clean and have at least 100 gb around to do processing and back up files when you travel and such than move them to your externals when you get home. The trick is keeping all your software on the laptop but the files somewhere else or just a temp folder on your laptop. Let's face is the most you may shoot on any given trip maybe 20 to 30 gbs tops so if you have a 200 gb drive than surely you will have at least a 100 gb free to process and make finals on the road. So you always want to keep this type of space on your laptop for the working times than transfer when you get home and clean off those files from your laptop when you have everything safe and secure on your home externals.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Good grief man! What did you have for breakfast today?

:ROTFL: :ROTFL: :ROTFL:
 

simonclivehughes

Active member
CAUTION
Not sure that everyone saw my earlier posting about changing the HDD in a MacBook Pro, but it bears repeating as there is a possible risk to your warranty:


WRT installing your own HDD in a MBP, be cautious. I asked when I bought my MBP and was told by Apple that it would compromise my warranty unless it was done by an Apple authorized shop. Since that time, I have upgraded twice (first from the stock 120GB to a 20GB and recently to a 320GB) and both times I have had it confirmed that to keep my (now extended) warranty, that it did indeed need to be done by an authorized dealer/shop.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Man that is pretty good John. Need help on that hard drive just call me . i have done it twice now. Now when you get the new drive in there . You will have to have the leopard disk in to boot from than you can install leopard and get on with it. I think just hold down the C key when it boots to get the DVD drive to be the startup. Checking on the C key

John you will have to format the drive correctly though . When you get the DVD to boot you want to go to the top to disk utlities and you need to format the drive to Mac journaled guide partition.

Anyone have screen captures of this process.
 
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