[PartialPants]

I am trying to get my wife a bigger hard drive for Valentine's day (I know... lame-o?... she'll love it though... and I will pour on the chocolates and flowers, and card too.. )

My Question is does she need SATA 1.5Gb/s or SATA 3.0Gb/s?

It's a Macbook 1st edition.

Is there anything for me to look out for in drive shopping? If the price is right I'd like to see if the 7200rpm drive would give her a speed increase.

Thanks everyone!

[mduell]

SATA speed doesn't matter.

You haven't mentioned a price range, so here's the options
7200RPM: 200GB for $200, 160GB for $150, 120GB for $110
5400RPM: 320GB for $180, 250GB for $140, 160GB for $83

But if you really love her, 128GB SSD for $3220 or 32GB SSD for $770.

[seanc]

My latest Gen. MacBook has in System Profiler, so I assume yours is the same since it can't be any slower.
3.0Gb/s SATA is backwards compatible with 1.5Gb/s so you don't need to worry about that when you're shopping around.

[mduell]

The Core Duo MacBook is based on the 945GM chipset, which includes ICH7-M, which indeed only supports 1.5Gb/s SATA.
Even if it did support 3Gb/s SATA, there's no mobile drive that can push >1.5Gb/s.

ICH8-M supports 3Gb/s but either the OS X driver only supports 1.5Gb/s or you have a 1.5Gb/s drive in your MacBook.

[DCJ001]

I got this and I recommend it for the 7200 RPM's and the low price:

HITACHI Travelstar 7K200 HTS722020K9SA00 0A50940 Hard Drive Bulk at ZipZoomfly

I also got this 2.5" enclosure for the drive that came with my MacBook so that I could easily copy the old drive to the new one by USB 2.0. It's $11.99 with free shipping, it looks and works great:

- Free Shipping: 2.5" Serial ATA (SATA) Notebook Hard Drive to USB 2.0 Aluminum External Enclosure : EMST25 (Retail, Silver) (Backordered)