macbook hard drive size

16 years ago

macbook black. 2yr old. 80gb drive. mac expert friend is going to put in bigger drive for me. he has similar unit and put in a 320gb. should i go with 250,320, or even 500? unit should have a few years life left.

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Comments (5)

kudzu9
16 years ago
It would help to know what you intend to do with such a huge hard drive. Unless you have a demanding need -- like a lot of movie editing or a humongous mp3 collection -- it's not necessarily always the best thing to do. I have a variety of computers and none of them has more than 40GB taken up. And anything that I do have on them that I can't afford to lose is always backed up to another drive and/or a CD/DVD. A huge hard drive can a disadvantage for two main reasons:
1. It encourages people to keep loading up the drive with a bunch of marginally useful programs, which slows down performance.
2. It's tempting to not back up the drive, and then when the drive fails you've got 5 years of family photos down the drain.
I'm not telling you not to do it. I'm just saying to assess your needs, your habits, and the importance of backing things up regularly to another drive or other storage media, and then decide whether you really need it. If you could explain a little more about what you want to do with increased storage capacity, it would be easier to give you advice relevant to your situation. Just my 2 cents...
joe_mn
Original Author
16 years ago
my college kids computer. she has drunk the apple coolaid and wants a time capsule. she has a wireless router and 160gb external drive now but does not like transferring files from the ext drive to mac. i try to discern her intentions and it seems to be capacity. i believe she has a capacity issue with her mac. a 160gb internal drive should work but why go thru the effort to swap drives when i can stick in a 250gb or so? should i just swap the 160 we have now and put the 80 in the ext enclosure? a 320 is only $80. not a big deal.
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3 GB ram is good for the 32 bit system, a 320 GB hard drive is very large so should do you for a while. the processor is dual core it sounds like from your info which is good it means it can do more at one time and do it faster so that is good too. Sounds like a good choice. What you could consider is getting a stand alone external USB hard drive that you can store some of your files on that you do not need access to all the time, that way your hard drive in your actual laptop is less cluttered and it frees up space on it. Anytime you need the files simply plug in that external usb hard drive and you have all your files availabe, you can move them back and forth from the pc to the usb drive and from the usb drive to the pc as you need it. Plus you can use that usb drive to keep a back up of your important files and work. I personally have a Seagate freeagent pro 500 GB usb hard drive which works great for those purposes plus it comes with software built in that when connected to my pc will automatically back up any of the files and folders I have told it to back up.
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Hard drives makes no noise. The fans in your PC makes a lot of noise. Use a cardioid directional mic to avoid picking up the noise. dcarch
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ravencajun Zone 8b TX
16 years ago
for a college student I would just go ahead and buy the 320 and put it in, I am putting a new hard drive (extra) in my pc and got a 500Gig, my main reason for such a large one is this will be for linux and with a large one I can create partitions and use various linux distros, that way I can test ones I want to try with out affecting my main partition.
But the kids now have to have lots of music and videos and all that stuff takes up so much room.
joe_mn
Original Author
16 years ago
can a single home user really justify a time capsule? the TC and notebook are literally feet apart. i think apple likes to tout their seamless interface of devices. apple does not care that i have a wireless router and ext drive. they want me to buy more new stuff and upgrade. gotta keep that income stream flowing.
joe_mn
Original Author
16 years ago
quick data transfer question. i got a usb 2.0 ext hard drive and cloned the mac drive. is there anyway to transfer the data via firewire to the ext drive? i read about firewire ext hard drives but the plan is to take apart the drive and put it into the mac. i also read there is no usb-firewire converters available. it took 2hrs to transfer 100gb. anyway to do it faster next time?

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macbook hard drive size

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macbook hard drive size

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