nxie askedThat’s an indication that it can’t find the System folder. It could be hardware (failing hard drive) or software (wonky OS). You can do an Archive and Install of your OS to rule-out the software. If that still doesn’t work, you may be looking at a failing hard drive.
renoraro askedDid you see this a few days ago? See, thing is, I’m clairvoyant and knew you’d be asking.
Running out of room on that MacBook? Have you started editing 1080p HD content in iMovie on that MacBook Pro? You’re probably going to need a big honkin’ yet fast hard drive in there. Have I got a solution for you!
Often, especially with laptop drives, speed, capacity and low cost were a situation where you pick two. You’re not going to get the third. Even if you begged. A lot.
Until now that is.
The folks over at Western Digital have come up with a crackin’ hard drive for your MacBook or MacBook Pro with the Western Digital Scorpio Blue. It’s 1TB (a terabyte!), speedy and will set you back round about $100.
One more time for emphasis: $100.
Say what?! That’s right, the trifecta of cost, speed and capacity is here for the masses. NewEgg will send it to you for $105 shipped if you’re hot to just go buy it. If you don’t want to take my word for it, HotHardware has the skinny on the performance. (Warning, you best speak geek. If phrases like “areal density” scare you, just take my word for it. It’s a good drive.) They compare it to the venerable Western Digital Scorpio Black drive. Granted, they use Windows benchmarks, but they will translate fairly well to the Mac side of the house.
So, since you’re not going to get any use out of it with it sitting in a box once it arrives, head over to iFixIt to see how to cram it in there. If you search Apple’s support site properly (e.g. “macbook hard drive replacement), you can find instructions there too.
mikechalmers askedThat Mac Pro’s got some life in it, yet. There’s a good reason why you shelled out $2500 for it when it was new. You can upgrade the snot out of it.
First thing you want to do slam some RAM in there. 1 GB is not enough for doing much of anything these days, especially video editing. If you head over to Crucial, you can pick up a 4GB kit for $159. Adding RAM is by far the biggest bang for the buck you can do for an upgrade to your Mac. Also, at some point RAM will become more expensive for your machine because RAM manufacturers may not be making that type of RAM anymore, thus the supply goes down and price goes up. I’d say you’re about at that point with your Mac Pro.
The second upgrade you can do is on that video card. Video cards in the iMac will now trounce the card that came in that Mac Pro (which was anemic for the time anyway). Head over to OtherWorldComputing to check out the ATI Radeon HD 5770. As long as you’re on Mac OS X 10.6.4 (or higher) that Mac Pro will support this card. It’ll set you back $259.
You may also want to consider storage space if you’re running a tad low. Thankfully, you can cram 4 hard drives into that Mac Pro with nary a worry. The drives you’re looking for are Serial-ATA. You can have a 1TB drive for $90 over at Amazon.
So, for under the cost of a Mac Mini, you’ll have yourself a Mac Pro that feels like a whole new machine (with some considerable balls).
itsjustsonic askedYou can go as big as you want. There are even 1TB laptop drives now, though they’re a bit pricey. What you’re looking for is a 2.5” SATA (Serial-ATA) hard drive. Most drives have a height of 9mm (and that’s what you’re looking for) but some are 12.5 and I’m not sure that one will fit in the MacBook. It’s amazing how close the tolerances are on laptops these days.
Brands? Everyone has their favorites, usually colored by good and bad experiences. Seagate and Western Digital are the drives Apple’s using these days, though they’ve also used IBM/Hitachi and Toshiba as well.
NewEgg has a nice Western Digital 500GB drive for $60 right now though it’s only a 5400 rpm, 8MB cache drive. If you’re looking for storage over speed, it’s a great option. NewEgg also has a Seagate 500GB drive that’s both 7200 rpm and 16MB cache. It’ll be faster than the other but it’s a bit more at $70. To me, it’s a no-brainer for the Seagate.
myfriendswillneverfindthishaha askedHonestly, that extra gig you’re going to put into the RAM won’t see much real world boost. As the memory is dual channel, it only works best by having paired DIMMs. So, a 1 and 2 GB DIMM isn’t going to perform as fast as two 2GB DIMMs. That’s not to say you won’t get a benefit from having more RAM, the raw read/write performance of it just won’t be as great. You can actually read up on it here.
The hard drive… you’re probably not going to see a “holy shit!” kind of leap in performance. Honestly the best performance gains you’ll probably see is from doing a fresh install of everything rather than cloning it all over with Carbon Copy (if that’s not too much of a hassle for you.)
What to do with old small drives… Since you’ve got a Time Machine drive for backups, sounds like you’ve got that covered. You could certainly put another OS on it like Ubuntu and play around with that without worry of what’s happening to your “good” drive. Treat it like a sandbox maybe :)
Good luck!
myxxomatosis askedYep, that’s it. Though, it’s often difficult to see what files are taking up what space. So, I recommend using Disk Inventory X to figure it out. It’ll give you a visual representation of your hard disk (or any other drive for that matter) so you can best decide what to delete.
thecadence askedThat drive should be just fine there. As long as the drive physically fits in your MacBook (and a 9mm high, 2.5” drive certainly will) you should be fine. The OS and hardware recognize Tera bytes upon Tera bytes of storage so a maximum recognizable storage size isn’t a worry.
lostnewyorker askedHey, you’re a frequent flyer round these parts. I outta start charging you! ;)
Logically, yeah your Mac can handle it. It’s all a matter of physical size. The standard laptop (2.5”) hard drive is 9mm in height. (The 2.5” measurement comes in the width of the drive.) It’s been a few months since I’ve looked, but last I was aware, these 1TB laptop drives were 12.5mm in height and they did fit into a MacBook.
My concern is that the heat movement inside your MacBook is designed to function in a specific way. If there’s that 3.5mm of space difference that should be used for airflow that is now occupied by hard drive… bad things could happen.
If the 1TB drive you’re looking for comes in 9mm height, I’d go for it. Otherwise, stay away until they reach that.
Just my advice.
whatyougotacrushonme askedCheck these posts out.
I'm a Mac geek.
