500GB in a MacBook: Seagate Momentus hard drive tested

Nate Lanxon | May 25, 2009

Apple won't sell you a 500GB harddisk for your Mac yet, but Seagate will. We've been testing Seagate's 2.5-inch Momentus 5400.6 500GB ST9500325AS SATA harddisk, which works a treat in the new unibody MacBooks, and is compatible with PlayStation 3 consoles.

500GB is a whole hell of a lot of storage, and 180GB more than the maximum drive capacity of 320GB that Apple sells. And, this much larger drive will cost you only about S$145 (US$102.36).

Once installed and formatted, you'll get about 460GB of usable space. It's a quiet little 5,400rpm disk like the ones that come with new MacBooks, giving maximum read speeds inside our Mac of 67.04MB/s and write speeds of 66.91MB/s. We tested with a 2008 Unibody MacBook with 2GB of RAM and a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, using Xbench.

Replacing a harddisk is not difficult--and in the new Unibody MacBooks, fitting your own doesn't invalidate your warranty--but we still don't advise you attempt it unless you're certain you know what you're fiddling with. But it took us a couple of minutes to get the disk fitted, and very chuffed we are with it, too. It's fast enough for most laptop functions, quiet, and a stonking upgrade option for media hoarders.

The drive goes for about S$145 (US$102.36) at several retailers at Singapore's Sim Lim Square.

Via CNET UK

Filed under: Notebooks, PC & Peripherals
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