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Hello, Samsung: A Bigger and Cooler MacBook Pro Hard Drive

The Hitachi 320GB 7200RPM 2.5“ hard drive I installed in my MacBook Pro on 9 April 2009 is running great, albeit hot. But it’s not big enough for my needs. And that 7200 revolutions per minute makes some serious heat! My MBP temperature right now — with a fan blowing at its back and its internal fans forced to the max of 6000RPM by smcFanControl — is 160 degrees. An Apple tech once told me this Mac was supposed to top out at 145 degrees and I found that to be generally true before upgrading to this Hitachi 7200RPM drive about a year ago.

So I’m going back to a 5400 RPM drive with next drive upgrade. Someone someplace online said something nice about Samsung drives running cool so I looked into it. I settled on the Samsung Spinpoint M7E HM501II 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5” SATA 3.0Gb/s drive from NewEgg for $64.99 + $1 S/H.

My Hitachi drive has served me faithfully for over a year now but I want something bigger and cooler.

18 July 2010 Update: I installed the drive yesterday. I re-used the instructions from iFixit that helped me with my Hitachi drive install a year ago. My thanks to the iFixit guys.

Restore
First thing I noticed while doing the data restore: This drive is cold.

Booting
After restoring my data from my SuperDuper!-created sparsebundle, I couldn’t get it to boot from the internal Samsung. Tried fixing permissions with the Disk Utility on the Snow Leopard DVD. Didn’t handle it, the Startup Disk utility still said it couldn’t bless the drive. Scary.

So, screw it, I created a new partition, erasing the old one and started a restore again last night right before going to bed. Today, I went right into the Startup Disk utility and it happily blessed the drive. Whew!

Temperature
The Mac is running right now at 136 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s about 20 less degrees than I’m used to. And since the fans don’t have to chug so hard to cool this new drive, the machine just seems so quiet. I love it.

I sincerely hope that this Samsung drive gives me years of error-free service. Just in case, I’ll endeavor to keep good backups.

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Kindle Number Two

We got my wife a Kindle the week it went down in price to $189. So far, she loves it.

The day Woot announced an agreement for Amazon to buy them, they put the same Kindle on sale (new) for $150. I snagged one. The idea was to just return the wife’s and keep the net $33 profit. But maybe I’d give it a try.

It came in yesterday. So I tried it. And loved it.

I still want an iPad. But the Kindle is, presently, for my bedside. No harsh backlight burning into my eyes, no screen refresh taxing my eyes. No 100,000 apps (or however many there are) to distract me from reading. Just me and a “book”.

I read it for an hour last night. It was easy on my eyes and I plan to keep it.

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18-200 VR Redux

Two days ago, Heycraig notified me of a Nikkor 18-200 VR for sale on Craigslist. I made the guy an offer. He declined. After one more round, he accepted. I took delivery of it last night. I’m happy with the lens condition and price. I’m excited to begin using it again. I traded my old 18-200 VR toward my F4i two years ago (also in April) and I’ve missed it ever since. The pictures I got from it just popped. Sharp, great color and consistently good.

30 May 2010 Update: A little over a month since acquiring it, my 18-200 VR is going strong. What a wonderful, wildly versatile lens this is! It doesn’t replace my 50mm f/1.8 Nikkor for available light photography but it’ll even do for that in a pinch, just with higher ISOs.