Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

60,000 Songs. In your achingly fashionable corduroy messenger bag.

This caused quite a stir on Twitter, so I thought I’d give the rest of the world a heads-up. I was looking for a buyer for my MacBook Pro but didn’t find one, so it was clearly time for at least a hard drive upgrade to make the machine more livable.

My usual source for hard drives is Dabs, since they carry a dazzling array of drives, always have it in stock and they get the finger out and ship on time. I also love their site’s interface for drilling down through the various specifications: choose SATA, choose laptop, choose 160-300GB.

300GB? Yes, 300GB. That’s not a typo.

I hadn’t caught the news that laptop drives had reached this kind of size. I knew Apple had a 250GB CTO option on the latest MacBook Pros, but I didn’t know 300GB even existed. The device in question is Fujitsu’s MHX2300BT. It’s a 2.5″ 300GB drive with a 4200rpm spindle and an 8MB buffer. I paid £116 at Dabs for it, which is a pretty nice price.

In between bulging Aperture and iTunes libraries, the chunky iLife ‘08 install, a Leopard partition and maybe Boot Camp in the future, 300GB is the kind of size one wants in a laptop these days.

I recently upgraded my 17″ Macbook Pro with a 200GB 7200 rpm Hitachi.
(HD speed being more important to me. 4200rpm feels like molasses to me)

The install wasn’t too bad, except the three screws near the latch in the battery compartment. They’re at like a 20° angle so you need a very thin, but strong screw driver to get them out and in.

The only downside is that now my latch is a little less ‘latchy’.
It’ll stay latched but it takes more of a push to get the latches to lock in.
I’m pretty sure it’s due to the weak lock in of those funky screws since I didnt have a very good screwdriver to use on em.

However, now I have an extra 100GB to play with!

Er - forgot to mention, the real funky part about those 20° screws is that the frame has an overhang that prevents direct top-down positioning with a normal sized screw driver.

Nice size, but won’t 4200 rpm make some stuff achingly slow?

Paul, I think it depends on what you’re doing. With larger files, it probably won’t be
an issue, but it might impact small-file I/O, such as compiling source.

Nice drive. But: width x depth x height = 70 mm x 100 mm x 12.5 mm. 12.5 mm, not 9 mm! Won´t fit…

“In your achingly fashionable corduroy messenger bag.”

Isn’t that the just another way of saying corduroy man-purse?