Well, here goes nothing! I’m about to do something that all laptop owners ought to do every few years- replace my hard drive! Laptop hard drives take so much abuse, being bumped around and moved all over the place, and nowadays people leave them on for days / weeks on end… My laptop hard drive is a good ~2 years old, and I have really abused it both physically and workload-related…

Some people’s philosophy is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” and there is indeed merit to this- I’ve obviously proven that my current HD is very reliable, and its a potential risk to replace a “perfectly good” hard drive with a brand new one that COULD be a lemon. However I’m more of the belief that “good things never last”, and indeed all hard drives DO fail eventually, it’s just a matter of when. So I replace hard drives, just in case they’re actually a ticking time bomb and I don’t even know it.

Now, all you computer savvy bloggers out there who maybe built your first PC when you were in kindergarden and know WAY more than I do about hard drives and failure rates and statistics etc. might say I’m a little too paranoid. Well, I don’t know much about computers, indeed, I just know that my data, especially truly priceless images, are very very important to me. I may have a bit of that apple mentality of “just throw a lot of money at something, and it’ll be okay…” but I guess that’s the price I pay for simplicity and peace of mind. I’m a camera geek, not a computer geek.

So, the next time I come online and blog, I’ll be running on a 120 gig, 7200 RPM / 8MB cache 2.5″ drive. I would have gotten the 160 gig but it was $60 more for 40 more gigs, and I was already paying a bit of a premium buying it in-store as opposed to on NewEgg.com.

If this all works out, I guess this means I’m pretty much sticking with my little black Macbook, instead of upgrading to a Macbook Pro like I wanted to. That’s okay, I saw the new 24″ iMac while I was at the store and oooh, I totally want one of those now!!!

Alright, see you on the other side!
=Matt=

[EDIT] Works great so far! (~5 days) I’ve been loading lots of data onto the new drive, downloading many gigs of images to it, etc. etc. and it runs fine. Not sure I notice any speed improvement over the previous 5400 RMP versus the new 7200 RPM, but I haven’t focused on it, either…

The drive, for those who asked, is a Fujitsu, the exact same brand of drive that came OUT of the macbook, ironically.

Now to see if this drive can stand the test of time!