My son has a late 2009 white plastic unibody MacBook with the original 5400 250GB hard drive, and with all his "stuff", it's nearly full!

I was going to increase the RAM as he does a lot of 3D stuff, and it's only got shared video ram, so thought I may as well put in a bigger & faster drive.

Any suggestions? The one it came with is a Hitachi, and it's been super reliable.

Cheers All

I would recommend SSD, year ago they were costly, today you could get 260GB for under £150 on line. Or you just go normal HD, make sure that is 7200RPM. Once again they are cheap as chips, 500GB for £50 quid. Buy some housing and use the old one as Time machine back up.

I have 2 external 500GB HD to store films, music and non essential stuff and one 100GB as my Time Machine.

Hitachi is really good, however do a little bit more reading because Apple are known to develop an issue with non approved replacement HD. The problem with some after market HD is that the fans start running in very high speed, in this case you either need smcFan Control program (free for Mac) or just get a comparable HD.

In short: Make sure that the HD you are buying is Apple comparable.

Thanks Padrino, that's exactly why I've held off getting a HD as I wasn't sure which were compatable. There are loads of sellers who say they are, but I'm almost certain many are not! He's good with the Time Machine as hes a 1TB seagate doing the business, and acess to NAS drives too, but I intend to use the existing HD as an external one for him anyway. I do like to have multiple layers of backups! Like you say an SSD would be lovely, might have a look at that too!

The issue I've mentioned early is with Apple, they are using the SMART temperature information over the SATA bus now. In short: The problem is only with the main SATA connector (temp data is being passed through form the hard drive directly through the data cable). Just another way of Apple to control the market However as I've pointed out even if you do not get one that is 100% you could control the fan speed with the program I've listed above. As you know all Mac's are running hot by default so in any way it would be better if you install it and set up your own speed on the fans. Mac default is 1098RPM and the CPU and HD could be as hot as 55/60C, with making your fans run just a bit faster at 1400RPM the temp drops down to 38/42C

I've got a 500gig Samsung 5400RPM drive in my May 2010 Macbook pro with no fan issues. I believe the fan issues only occur on even later models than mine. When I got the upgraded drive there were no reports of fan issued in 2010. I have also upgraded the RAM to 8GB using memory from Crucial.

I've got a 500gig Samsung 5400RPM drive in my May 2010 Macbook pro with no fan issues. I believe the fan issues only occur on even later models than mine. When I got the upgraded drive there were no reports of fan issued in 2010. I have also upgraded the RAM to 8GB using memory from Crucial.

Yep, you are correct but the OP stated that his boy Mac is 2009 model, so chances are that he could have some issues. I don't want to run scaremongering here but just to make him aware. I am using Mac and I love the damn thing

My brother recently got one of these for his MacBook Pro when the hard drive failed on it:

http://www.ebuyer.co...-ssd-st750lx003

It's a kind of hybrid that has an 8GB flash/cache and a 750GB 7200rpm drive. It "learns" what you use often and uses the 8GB cache as a sort of buffer to make accessing those programs/docs/etc a lot quicker. Works a treat and he says it's noticeably quicker than the standard 5400rpm disk that Apple supply. Was also a doddle to fit

Edited 7 June, 201214 yr by slicendice

I had the white MacBook (I think it was to 2008 model) before upgrading to my current Air. Even a cheapo Kingston SSD made a huge difference to the performance.

As far as I can remember the HDD and RAM are user serviceable parts, but you could always check with Apple.

Yep, you are correct but the OP stated that his boy Mac is 2009 model, so chances are that he could have some issues. I don't want to run scaremongering here but just to make him aware. I am using Mac and I love the damn thing

Isn't that only an issue with iMacs? Certainly I just fitted a SSD to the latest model MacMini and there's been no issue at all and the missus' 2009 MBP is running fine with a 3rd party HDD (7200rpm job).

I think there is an issue with OSX not supporting Trim automatically for non "Apple" SSDs though, although it can be turned on.

I have a mid 2009 Aluminium MacBook Pro and have a Crucial M4 SSD fitted last summer. Much faster. I only have a 128, but the 256 is now almost as cheap as the 128 I bought a year ago. I bought a housing off ebay and use the old disk as a backup. I also have a 2GB time capsule for time machine backups.

There is a neat little trick you need to do to enable TRIM, as apple only enable it for their own SSD's. Just need to google it and there are lots of people who give the same info.

The only problem I have with the SSD is when on battery power, I let it go to sleep, and I then want to use it again straightaway. It can take a while to wake up until it has written everything from the memory to the SSD or something like that. If I wait for for a minute or two it is fine. Took me a while to work out what was happening.

If Macs are sooooooooooooooooo good..............................why would you possibly need to upgrade them? :| :|

:p

Thanks guys. In the end I bought 4GB of ram, a WD 500GB HDD & a 2.5" HDD enclosure from a variety of internet suppliers, all for less than £100. Half an hour later and we are up and running again

No doubt my son will soon fill this drive, but for now all is sorted and he has a the original drive, as a bootable external drive as well as his time machine backups.

Upgraded my macbook as soon as i got it in 2008 to 4gb of ram, and a 256GB SSD stayed super cool ever since.

Yeah, since doing my sons, I've been looking into SSD's for mine, lol!