Review on 💾 HGST Travelstar 2.5-Inch 750GB Internal Hard Drive 7200 RPM SATA II 16 MB Cache (0S03339) [Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging] by Michael Bazen

Seagate 160GB 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive of my Late 2007/Early 2008 15" MacBook Pro got a little dusty in February 2011. week, so I got a lot busier making my daily SuperDuper backups to my external Firewire drive. Google SuperDuper if you need more information. I first replaced the defective Seagate drive in my MacBook Pro with a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 5400rpm 500GB Bulk/OEM 2.5" 8MB Cache 5400rpm SATA II WD5000BEVT hard drive and although it worked fine , the WD drive sometimes felt slow when I clicked on a program icon or even an email in my Thunderbird email client. I often used the color wheel to spin the Mac before the program opened. I doubt it was the speed difference between the drives. I'm not sure what's going on with the Western Digital Scorpio Blue drive, but I'm inclined to think it may have an aggressive power saving feature built into its firmware that's causing it to freeze and stop frequently. I cannot verify this. Since there weren't any software tools to check or disable it (if that was indeed the cause), I decided to try Hitachi disk 0S02858 instead. I'm glad I did. Everything about this app is way better. The Hitachi drive responds immediately after clicking a program icon, opening a document, reading an email, etc. No more waiting for the drive to respond to the spinning color wheel. Hitachi is also faster than WD when opening and loading applications (Excel spreadsheets, text documents, PDF files, etc.), as it should be at 7200 rpm versus 5400 rpm. But again, the biggest improvement lies in initial responsiveness. The Hitachi drive is also quiet. I feel a very slight vibration when I place my hand on the area where the drive is installed, but it's not uncommon and comparable to the slight vibration I felt with the original drive in my MacBook Pro. My basic steps for swapping drives: Open your MacBook Pro. There are several images and video clips on the web that show exactly how to do this. All you need is a Torx T6 tool and a Philips #00 screwdriver. - Replace the defective 2.5" SATA drive with a new one and reassemble your MacBook Pro. - Boot from an external backup drive. You have a recent bootable backup. , Is not it? I use SuperDuper to create a bootable backup, but there are other popular programs out there. Incidentally, an external firewire drive is much faster than USB 2.0, but USB 2.0 will work if that's all you have.- After you boot up and mount your external drive, the Mac will warn you that you have an uninitialized drive in the have system. You'll be asked if you want to initialize it. If you don't get this warning, simply run Mac Disk Utility to partition your new drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). - Now use SuperDuper (or your favorite similar program) to re-clone your new internal drive with the contents of your external backup (which you are currently booting from). Depending on how much material you have and whether you're using USB or Firewire, this can take around 20-30 minutes. up to over an hour. - Now boot normally from the internal drive. - Spotlight may start re-indexing your files, but once that's done everything should be back to normal. Additional Notes: Disk Utility reports this Hitachi drive as "Hitachi HTS725050A9A364 Media" which is consistent with what other people have mentioned here. I can't comment on the reliability of the Hitachi drive as I haven't had it that long, but I'm very happy with its performance. It's quiet and contrary to other reviews (maybe on Windows) I don't hear any weird clicks, calibrations or other noises.