Questions about upgrading hard drive for MacBook Pro
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Hello Everyone,
I am looking at buying a new hard drive for my early 2008 15" MBP. I have the stock 250Gb and looking at getting the Western Digital 1Tb HD. I would like to completely clone my hard drive to preserve my parallels windows virtual machine and all the games i have on it i just don't trust time machine for all my programs. i was looking at SuperDuper! and CarbonCopyCloner. I wanted to ask if anyone has experience with either of these and if I absolutely needed a firewire hard drive enclosure. I have a USB but am not sure if it will work. Thank you in advance for anyone who can help me with this
I am looking at buying a new hard drive for my early 2008 15" MBP. I have the stock 250Gb and looking at getting the Western Digital 1Tb HD. I would like to completely clone my hard drive to preserve my parallels windows virtual machine and all the games i have on it i just don't trust time machine for all my programs. i was looking at SuperDuper! and CarbonCopyCloner. I wanted to ask if anyone has experience with either of these and if I absolutely needed a firewire hard drive enclosure. I have a USB but am not sure if it will work. Thank you in advance for anyone who can help me with this
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In order to copy files over you are going to have to have both hard drives connected at the same time and a laptop will only have room for one slim 2.5" drive (normal drives are 3.5"). So you will end up having to use an external enclosure for the 2nd drive. Also because you will be using an enclosure anyways what is the need to clone the drive? Just keep on using the drive you already have for the operating system and program files and put all of your documents and media on the external. Also most, if not all, enclosures work using USB so you should have no problem there. Another benefit is now you have a drive you can carry around if you need to and you can share it with your friends and copy their data onto yours as well.
But if you really need a program to clone your hard drive I suggest GParted to do so. You can burn it to a CD or a USB stick and boot from it.
But if you really need a program to clone your hard drive I suggest GParted to do so. You can burn it to a CD or a USB stick and boot from it.
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I have most of my space taken up by photoshop, autocad, and parallels for running windows(it's really big 160GB) i have numerous eroge and other games on there. i don't want to have to uninstall and reinstall whenever i want to play something different so i was looking at replacing the smaller HD for the bigger one. Since I don't really want to carry a second external hard drive just to play my games when i am traveling, after the goal of laptops is portability, I wanted a new larger hard drive. I took a look at GParted and i don't see anything about it making a sector by sector clone. It also seems to need other programs to run properly i sort of hesitant as i am not that confident with anything too complicated.
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So in that case you are replacing the 2.5" with another 2.5"? You will end up having to use an enclosure on the new drive temporarily in order to have both of them hooked up at the same time. Also you need to know how the drive connects to the motherboard so you know what enclosure you will need to get and if you will need an adapter. Say your current one uses SATA then you will need a 2.5" SATA drive and an enclosure that has the hookups for SATA drive. IF it uses PATA then you will probably end up having to use a 2.5" to 3.5" PATA adapter so it will work with the enclosure unless it is specifically designed for a 2.5". Also the enclosure may not house the drive correctly as it will be smaller than a normal drive unless you get an enclosure specifically designed for that. Those are just some things you need to be aware of. Don't want you blowing your money on stuff that doesn't fit.
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Yes i have already confirmed that the hard drives are compatible (both are 2.5" SATA and are compatible with the MBP). Well the HD in my computer is not a problem but the enclosure for the new HD is another story i have a compatible enclosure but it is USB as USB is not as fast a Firewire 800 i wasn't sure if it was ok to use it for transferring the contents of my old drive to the new one.
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There shouldn't be a problem with using it but it will be a little bit slower. Firewire 800 runs at 786.432 Mbit/s and USB 2.0 runs at 480 Mbit/s so its 300 Mbit/s faster. Hard drives take a long time to copy files over even when at SATA 2 speeds and as you can guess the more files there are the longer it will take.
So 250GB of data at firewire 800 speeds will take at minimum 43 minutes to copy over and the same amount at USB 2.0 speeds will take at minimum 71 minutes to copy over. When you look at it this way it doesn't seem that bad as both are going to take a while anyway. Also, I say at minimum because it will always take longer due to the sizes of the files and how they are located on the disk and you will actually be limited more by the hard drive having to search around for files before it transfers them.
So 250GB of data at firewire 800 speeds will take at minimum 43 minutes to copy over and the same amount at USB 2.0 speeds will take at minimum 71 minutes to copy over. When you look at it this way it doesn't seem that bad as both are going to take a while anyway. Also, I say at minimum because it will always take longer due to the sizes of the files and how they are located on the disk and you will actually be limited more by the hard drive having to search around for files before it transfers them.
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Ok thanks i have been looking around on other sites too it seems that there are people having problems upgrading the HD but i think the program copies everything and makes it the same on both drives so i hope it doesn't take too long but thank you so much for your help and i'm sorry i don't have the post count to give you a +rep