MacBook Pro upgrade to Momentus disk

By Tim | January 19, 2010

Time for some geekiness I’m afraid. Because I have subdivided my laptop disk in two to house both OS/X and Windows 7 what was a reasonable 250gb reduces to 125gb each, and both OSs have swallowed that space up, so time had come for an upgrade. I opted for one of the new Seagate Momentus drives, a 500gb model with 7200rpm disk speed, and yet only (a claimed) 0.05% increase in power consumption.

First step was to run a crude disk speed test on both boot systems, and then a thorough back-up. For the Mac I chose to use Superduper, backing up via Firewire (the recommended route) to a 150gb external drive. The key here was to have a fully bootable system on the external disk (a Firewire external drive is a pre-requisite for this), and the process was very simple albeit time consuming – in all it took around 2.5 hours.

Then I booted into Windows and removed a number of large folders to an external USB drive (to reduce the size of the eventual Ghost image to be created), and then rebooted into Ghost using a Bart PE CD. The only problem I had was my original choice of external USB drive (an Iomega 1tb) refused to be recognised by Bart, but an older 250gb Lacie worked fine, and I ended up with a 40gb Ghost image (for those who’ve never used Ghost this is one massive file containing everything on the Windows disk).

It turned out that the swapping of the hard disk in my 2009 Macbook Pro could not have been easier – remove the power cord and USB devices, the battery cover and then the battery, and unscrew three tiny cross head screws securing the drive (one of which holds a securing bar that lifts out) that sits next to the battery. The drive connects via a connector block that fits onto the SATA connectors snugly. The only problem that arose was that the existing drive had four lugs screwed in to its side screw holes, but these were of such a tiny hex type format that nothing I had would shift them. In the end a pair of pliers loosened each one and a just about fitting flat head screw driver completed the task of removal.

The lugs were then fitted to the new drive, along with the SATA connector, then the securing bar and cross head screws. Finally the battery was replaced along with the cover and the restore process could commence. From web articles I knew that the new drive would first have to be initialized, which required the OS/X system CD. Once completed the machine could be rebooted with the external Firewire drive attached, holding down the Alt key to select the external drive to boot to.

Superduper was then run from the external drive and proceeded to copy back everything, but noticeably faster (which started to make it all seem worthwhile). Once completed I ran Bootcamp and repartitioned the disk into two equal halves and set the machine to reboot and install Windows. I wanted to just restore the Ghost image, but first booted to a Windows 7 DVD to format the Windows disk with NTFS. I then booted again from the Bart CD and restored the Ghost image. Again encouragingly Ghost was averaging 1900mb a minute which is not bad at all! But all was not well on the Windows 7 side once it had completed the restore process.

When I rebooted the Windows hard disk icon was absent as a bootable option – the image had transferred and everything was there, but the partition just wasn’t bootable. I wasn’t too surprised by this, and booted from a Windows 7 DVD to repair the partition boot sector. However despite the repair running OK the machine still refused to show up as a bootable disk. I repeated the process, and then opted to do a quick complete re-installation of Windows to the drive and left the laptop doing this while I went to work.

Once completed the Windows drive correctly showed up as a bootable option. I then rebooted using Bart, transferred the Ghost image across and this time the Windows drive still showed, although it again refused to actually boot, complaining of errors. This time a quick run of the repair option on the Windows 7 DVD and everything was back in business. But to what end?

Well, re-running the Windows Performance assessment showed the disk drive performance had improved from 5.3 to 5.9, a very significant increase. The boot times from the Bootcamp disk icon to desktop loaded for Mac OS/X changed from 49.5 seconds to 43.6, and for Windows 7 from 57.2 seconds to 50.5. I allowed both systems to reboot several times as each ‘settles in’ to a new hard disk, optimizing load routines over a number of starts. And then there is all that extra disk space