Whether you choose this model or the aforementioned Momentus XT should depend on your budget and how much you value reliability. It is a very noticeable improvement and the MacBook Pro feels much faster even just working in the Finder, opening applications, and cold booting. A friend of mine replaced his stock 7200rpm drive with one of these in his MacBook Pro and it absolutely screams, scoring nearly twice as fast in many XBench tests for reads/writes. Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200RPM Hard Drive – $65 – the Seagate Momentus is incredibly fast and very cheap, without a doubt this is the fastest MacBook Pro hard drive upgrade under $100. The Affordable Powerhouse: MacBook Pro + Seagate Momentus 7200 Con: Costs more than a standard 7200 RPM drive.Pro: Extremely fast, best price/performance ratio, more reliable than older Seagate Momentus.

This is a highly recommended upgrade to a MacBook Pro and offers the best disk performance and reliability for the price. Their marketing speak says it’s an “SSD hybrid drive”, whatever that means I don’t know because it’s still a spinning drive at 7200RPM, but one thing I do know is that this is an amazingly fast drive. The drive approaches speeds of an SSD but costs significantly less, and despite the huge speed boost from the faster drive, battery life isn’t really affected. Apps launch faster, boot times are faster, everything is snappier, without a doubt you will see noticeable speed improvements. Seagate claims the drive performs 80% faster than traditional 7200 RPM drives, and I don’t think thats much of an exaggeration.

If you want a superfast hard disk but don’t want to spring for an SSD, this is the drive for you. Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB 7200RPM – $150 – the Seagate Momentus XT is basically the newer version of the Seagate Momentus drive. The Powerhouse: MacBook Pro + Seagate Momentus XT 7200 It’s pretty impressive what a new hard drive can do for your systems performance, so without further ado here are my recommendations for the best drives: Upgrading the hard drive on your MacBook Pro is pretty easy and it’s a great way to breathe new life into an older machine, or turn a new machine into a blistering fast workhorse.

Upgrade macbook pro hard drive 2011