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Swap out internal HD with an external portable drive
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Beaumont Texas
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I was interested in upgrading my internal hard drive and remember seeing someone get an external and open it up and put that hard drive in the laptop and their old internal into the external case. Well I want to know, how easy or difficult is it to open the case on the Western Digital portable hard drive? And also, is Western Digital a good hard drive to go with? feel free to recommend another way to do this.
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32GB iPad 2 | 32GB iPhone 4 | 11' MacBook Air 1.6 i5, 4GB, 128GB SSD
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Aug 2001
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"It's weird the way 'finger puppets' sounds ok as a noun..."
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
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As always, I recommend you get an external enclosure instead of a pre-built external hard drive. Not only can you get a better quality enclosure this way, but external enclosures are designed to be easy to open up and swap the drive out of, whereas pre-built external drives aren't and, in my experience, can be a complete pain to open up.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Aug 2001
Status:
Offline
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"It's weird the way 'finger puppets' sounds ok as a noun..."
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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It's difficult to know (before cracking the external open) if the drive inside the external is ATA or SATA.
I'd just buy an internal drive (usually with a better warranty than an external anyway) and a separate enclosure. Newegg carries both with good prices and service.
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Beaumont Texas
Status:
Offline
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32GB iPad 2 | 32GB iPhone 4 | 11' MacBook Air 1.6 i5, 4GB, 128GB SSD
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Beaumont Texas
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Also what type of enclosure would I need to get for it?
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32GB iPad 2 | 32GB iPhone 4 | 11' MacBook Air 1.6 i5, 4GB, 128GB SSD
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
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One thing you might want to think about is the fact that Seagate drives have a 5-year warranty, whereas that Western Digital probably doesn't.
As for the enclosure, it depends - what type of connectors are you looking for? USB 2.0? FireWire? FireWire 800? eSATA? If USB 2.0 or eSATA, pretty much anything will work, but if you're going FireWire, you should look for an enclosure that uses the Oxford chipset (they tend to be a bit more expensive, of course). Other than that, you'll want to get a 2.5" enclosure to fit your 2.5" drive, and you'll want to make sure that you get an enclosure that takes a Serial ATA drive, since that is the type of hard drive used in your MacBook, and not regular parallel ATA.
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