Seagate Momentus 7200.3 ST9320421AS - Hard drive - 320 GB - internal - 2.5" - SATA-300 - 7200 rpm - buffer: 16 MB Review

This is the ideal upgrade disk - 16MB buffers, 7,200 RPM, very good IO scores from the benchmarking community.In early 2009, this disk is right on the sweet spot of high performance and low cost.

I think the guy complaining about an "OEM Drive" meant to say that this disk is not an external Firewire or USB disk in a cabinet.It is an internal drive, using standard SATA laptop connectors.

I upgraded my Macbook Pro's 120 GB drive because it was more than 80% full and I wanted to add another 10GB VM and several thousand pictures.Although OSX allocates files smaller than 20 MB in contiguous chunks, making defrag unnecessary, as the disk fills up, contiguous allocation gets more difficult and writes get slower.Since most user apps do some writing (browsers write lots of temp files), the whole system feels slower.

The result of the upgrade was to reduce the bootup time by 15 seconds out of 2.5 minutes, and double the launch speed of Firefox and similar apps (20s -> 10s).

My upgrade procedure was to set up an empty 120GB partition on my USB external drive, turn off Time Machine, and use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything.I did not select CCC's block-copy cloning, because I wanted to defrag some very large files.Done this way, over USB, took 3 hrs to copy, then 40 minutes with a screwdriver (not rushing, as this was the first time I've opened a laptop), and a little over 1.5 hrs to copy back from the external drive to the new 320 GB disk.

Afterwards, I set TM to ignore the transfer partition, and it automatically re-built my entire backup.I don't know why, but it stayed busy for several hours.

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Product Description:
The Seagate Momentus 7200.3 drive - the industry's highest-performing 7200-RPM laptop hard drive - delivers performance, small size and mobility to all users. Available with G-Force Protection, this drive also offers added durability and robustness in the event of the accidental drops that can occur in strenuous mobile environments. The Seagate Momentus 7200.3 laptop hard drives are perfect for mainstream and performance laptops, workstations and small form factor PCs.

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