Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Short version: I installed this in my aluminum unibody MacBook. It works fine. I have oodles of free space. It's pretty quiet. At the time, I think it was the largest capacity 9.5mm tall notebook drive available.
Long version:
I didn't really want to upgrade my MacBook. I had plenty of room on the 500GB hard drive I had purchased just 6 months before, also a Western Digital Scorpio Blue, but something was wrong, and I didn't know what. My applications were stalling out after disk intensive operations. I tried re-installing OS X, rebuilding the Spotlight database, fixing permissions, everything and it still happened. So in desperation, I decided to upgrade my hard drive a little early, going up to this 640GB, even though it was the same brand that might have been failing me. And for whatever reason, it's worked reliably ever since. Remember to de-authorize your iTunes account on the original drive before removing it, and do a final Time Machine backup (assuming you make Time Machine backups) before shutting down.
Anyone who remembers the pain of exchanging the hard drive out of a PowerBook G4 or even a white Intel MacBook, can appreciate the ease involved in swapping hard drives from the unibody line of Apple portables. A latch, 5 screws and an SATA cable are all that stand in your way. You will need a small Phillips head screwdriver and a T6 torx screwdriver. It literally takes 3 minutes to swap the drives. Then you can either rebuild from a Time Machine backup or from the original drive, assuming you have an external hard drive case or a USB to SATA adaptor.
This drive had too large a capacity for an external case I bought in 2008 which was rated up to 500GB. I had to put the old drive in the case to retrieve data, and the new drive in the MacBook to format it.
Remember that when you format a MacBook's boot drive with Disk Utility to make sure you are using the GUID option for your journaled HFS+ boot partition. That bit me once on an external drive and it took me 3 reformats to figure out what I was missing. Double and triple check that you are formatting the new drive and not the old drive!!!I chose this drive because it was at the time the highest capacity 9.5mm tall notebook available. There are 12mm tall drives with higher capacity, but those will not fit comfortably in a MacBook. This drive is not going to make you jump around with joy, it stores your data, it's moderately fast for a 5400RPM drive, it is not noisy, and it's comparatively inexpensive. So it's a solid value.
And it prevents me from wasting my time looking for things to throw away. Have you ever spent half an hour throwing away old files to free up 20 cents worth of hard drive space? Our time is too valuable for that. Just get a bigger drive; they are cheap.
I hope this is my last disk base hard drive in my laptop. Solid state drives are rapidly dropping in price, and raising in capacity, and the speed advantage is game changing. Maybe this time next year, I'll make the move. Still this drive has the capacity to keep me going.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Western Digital 640 GB 5400rpm SATA2 8 MB 2.5-Inch Notebook Hard Drive WD6400BEVT (Scorpio Blue)
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