Within the first week of having my MacBook, I had filled the hard drive. I had purchased the black model which gave me 80 GB of storage but with all the music files, photoshop documents, web site work, and different operating systems, I knew that I would fill that hard drive in no time. I kept that in mind when I purchased the computer and knew that new perpendicular recording laptop drives were on the horizon. I was waiting for the release date of the Seagate 2.5-inch 160GB laptop drive, but the Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 160GB drive had beat it to market and I was out of hard drive space so I went with that.

Installation was very straight forward in the MacBook. After removing the battery, there is a door with three screws that hide the hard drive and the RAM slots. When this is removed the hard drive tray slides out. Four screws hold the drive onto the tray so I removed these from the old drive and attached them to the new drive. I had made a stupid mistake and put the hard drive in upside down. It took me a while to figure out why the drive wasn’t working but after that hiccup the drive started fine. Removal of the old drive and installation of the new drive is no more than 15 minutes as long as you remember which way the drive goes.

As far as data transfer goes, I keep pretty good backups of my systems. On top of backup, all important data is held on multiple machines. For this reason I started the drive with a fresh Mac OS X install and transfered data manually. The drive in the MacBook was already relatively speedy but I did notice it being a tad bit faster on the OS installation. It might have just been my mind playing tricks on me or I was just hoping that I had made a good purchase.

After the OS was installed, a lot of people like using the Migration Wizard built into OS X to transfer the data. I have used this before and for the most part it works. I’m pretty picky on my software installations so I like to do them manually. I installed all the software and transfered all my files over the network and everything seemed to work great.

Real world performance is pretty good. With the fast CPU, large hard drive and 2GB of RAM in that machine it runs really well. It is probably one of the fastest machines I’ve used both PC and Mac running both Mac OS X and Windows.

I had effectively doubled my hard drive capacity and it was relatively painless to upgrade. For those looking to upgrade to a larger faster hard drive Hitachi makes some great drives. This drive will only work with the MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops on the Apple side and I know it will work in a number of PCs equipped with SATA. While it could be used in a desktop, I don’t know why anyone would consider this since desktop drives are faster with larger capacities at a lower price. I guess if you are looking for a drive for an 2.5-inch external enclosure with SATA this will work for you too. I plan to put my old drive in one when I get the chance.

Overall, I would recommend this drive. There have been no problems thus far and it offers great speed and capacity for a laptop drive. The drive is a little pricey, but that’s what you get for the latest and greatest. Of course if you hold out, as more and more perpendicular drives hit the market prices will decrease. If you need it right away, it’s a good buy.