10,000 Foot Developer

I have an old 2nd-gen MacBook with a core 2 duo processor and ram maxed at 4 gb (although, due to the bus in this, only 3.3 are used).   Running Snow Leopard.  It had a 320 gb 5400 rpm drive so I thought I squeeze some life out of it before I buy a new Windows machine for my Ruby and Android dabblings.

BTW — the old Hitachi drive the machine came with BLEW OUT.  Long time ago, lost data.  Won’t let that happen again.

Here’s how I put the new drive in.

1. I purchased a new WD 7200 320 gb Scorpio drive off Amazon for $55.  I bought model BEKT  because it does NOT have the atuo-shutdown it it detects a fall — I heard there were some incompatibilities for other models.  Also, I purchased a SATA external drive enclosure for $5; since I would like to use my old drive for a while as mobile storage.
2. Swap out the old drive for the new drive (after backing up and shutting down).  I do incremental backups with Silverkeeper, BTW — a free LaCie utility.  The drive sits by the battery in this model; the process is the same almost as replacing RAM — three screws and a bracket.
3. Put the old drive in the new enclosure.
4. Get your Snow Leopard disk, and start the machine inserting the disk and holding the “C” key down — boot to the CD like you are installing Snow Leopard.
5. Go through the language screen, then choose “Disk Utility” from the menu at the top (don’t install Snow Leopard!!!).
6. Important: FORMAT and PARTITION the new disk.  It’s not enough to clone it.  After you are done, exit the Disk Utility and start Snow Leopard Installation (you will stop this though).   If the installation will let you choose your new disk an an installation disk then the format/partition was good (now it is blessed).  I do this because a mere clone-from-backup didn’t seem to set up an MBR properly to mark the disk as a startup disk.
7. Plug the usb enclosure with your old drive into the machine.
8. Back out of the installation to the start installation screen — or wherever you can choose “Disk Utility” again — you will see both the new and old drives.
9. Now, do a “restore from backup.”  Choose the “Untitled partition from the old drive as the source, and the “Untitled” partition from the new drive as the destination.    You can even drag an drop.
10. Click and run — takes about 1.5 hours for 60 gb’s transfer (in my case) or more.
11. At the end, confirm the installation by exiting Disk Utility, and seeing if the install will let you choose the new disk as an installation disk — you should still be able to.  Don’t install though.
12. Disconnect your USB drive, then in the menu choose “Start up Disk” and it should let you choose the new disk.  Proceed with the start up.  You’re done!

The performance improvement was very, very noticeable.  I improved my XBench score from 104 to 131, a 27% performance improvement.

I think this really shows how a higher speed hard drive can really improve performance.  In the future, I am not sure if Mac Users will be able to do this but its certainly a time honored Windows and Unix machine users practice to upgrade their machines.  I am quite happy.