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My Macbook Pro model A1278 2.3 GHz i5 mounts a 320Gb Hitachi hard drive as you know. During my last scan with Drive Genius, it showed I had more than 900 bad or suspect block at 1% of scan. The mac has been backed up fine with time machine and I haven’t encounter yet in any corrupted files. However, I know it would only get worse. Should I replace my hard drive, and if yes, can I upgrade to a 7200 RPM or should I replace it with a 5400 RPM. I have two options for 5400 RPM. A 500Gb Hitachi Travelstar with a 7mm profile or 1TB Hitachi Travelstar with a 9mm profile. Would the 9mm fit? Which one would you recommend? Hope I wasn’t too painful!!! Thank you for your time and best regards MS
I personally would go with a hybrid drive (HD/SSD combo) and you can use a drive that is 9.5mm high. Here’s Seagates offerings Seagate SSHD and here’s Western-Digitals offerings WD Blue series and Hitiachi Travelstar series Your system can also support a larger drive than 500GB. The current largest drive that would work in your system is a Hitachi Travelstar 1.5TB Both Seagate & Western Digital (Hitachi) make good drives.
First determine if it is indeed your hard drive or the hard drive cable ( known issue and pet peeve of mine). These bad cables will also destroy a hard drive. So test your hard drive outside of this machine. Use another Mac or a Universal Adapter [linked product missing or disabled: IF107-108-1]. My favorite hard drive replacement in this machine is a hybrid drive, the Seagate Momentus XT, such as this one: 500 GB SSD Hybrid 2.5" Hard Drive.
These MacBook Pro models support a 2.5" notebook hard drive or SSD that is up to 9.5 mm tall (0.37 inches) & use a SATA interface. Your model supports 6.0 Gb/s aka SATA 3.0. So how much you want to spend will determine what you buy…be aware that the industry nickname for “Travelstar” is “Deathstar” (due to a high rate of failure) perhaps a different manufacturer is worth considering. If this Answer is helpful please remember to return and mark it Accepted.
