The Tech Bench

MyService has the new Western Digital 750GB 5400RPM 9.5mm drives in stock for the MacBook & MacBook Pro.

These new drives are the first standard height (9.5mm) 750GB drives and work in all MacBooks & MacBook Pros.

These are the largest mobile drives currently available for the MacBooks and pre-unibody 15″ MacBook Pros.

They have 8MB of cache, 12.0ms seek time and use the 3Gb/s SATA interface.

In Stock: $299

Includes: Free shipping, professional installation, data transfer and a 3 year warranty.

This upgrade will not void your Apple warranty. Use your old drive for backup.

Check out our hard drive upgrade page for details.

MyService has the new Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB 5200RPM drives in stock for the MacBook Pro.

These drives are slightly higher than standard 2.5″ drives but fit perfectly in all Unibody MacBook Pros, the 13″ MacBook Unibody and the 17″ (Silver Keyboard) MacBook Pro.

These are the largest mobile drives currently available.

They have 8MB of cache, 12.0ms seek time and use the 3Gb/s SATA interface.

In Stock: $345

Includes: Free shipping, professional installation, data transfer and a 3 year warranty.

This upgrade will not void your Apple warranty. Use your old drive for backup.

Check out our hard drive upgrade page for details.

The Apple Hardware Test (AHT) is a limited but useful hardware diagnostic tool that comes preloaded on all new (2008 and later) Macs.

The folder containing the AHT is located in /System/Library/CoreServices/

Note that the .diagnostics folder and contents are invisible so you may need to run a program like InVisibles to view the folder.

While the software will stay intact when upgrading to a new OS like Snow Leopard, the AHT is machine specific and does not come with stand alone versions of OS X. In other words, if you format your hard drive and install OS X from a retail copy, AHT will not be included.

To insure that AHT is installed, you’ll need to restore your OS from your original restore disks if you format your drive. AHT will be carried over if you do a clone upgrade but not if you just do a data migration.

You can also run AHT directly from your restore disks by holding down the “D” key with the disk installed on boot.

When you hold down the “D” key on boot, the EFI will first scan the optical drive, then hard drives to look for the .diagnostics folder.

You can read more about how to use AHT here.

After upgrading or replacing a hard drive on a Unibody MacBook or MacBook Pro, you may experience longer than average boot times.

The solution is to select your new hard drive as the default startup disk inside System Preferences.

This lag in boot time (up to 30 secs.) is caused by the system looking for the startup disk. In PowerPC Macs, you’d sometimes see a flashing question mark while the system looked for a volume to boot off of. Early Intel Macs went through this process very fast and you may not have noticed a lag.

The Unibody series of MacBook and MacBook Pro seem to take longer (are more thorough) in looking for a startup disk if no default has been set. Sometimes, a 10.6 upgrade will also deselect the hard drive as a startup default.

When you’re in Startup Disk inside of System Preferences, the default disk will be the one whose text is highlighted. If none of the text is highlighted, there is no default set. Simply click on the disk you want to set as default and click restart.

This 17″ MacBook Pro is in for a hard drive upgrade. With the top case off, you get a great view of the components that make up the laptop.

1. Hard Drive - 1.5 Gbps 2.5″ SATA
2. Optical Drive – 8X DL ATA SuperDrive
3. RAM – 2 Pieces PC2-5300 (667Mhz)
4. Logic Board – Intel Core 2 Duo CPU & NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT GPU are on the underside
5. Airport Module - 802.11N wireless card
6. Bluetooth Module
7. Fan – One of two
8. ALS (Ambient Light Sensor) – One of two, other one is in the upper left near the DC-in
9. Temperature Sensor
10. Speaker Assembly – 4 Speakers (2 left, 2 right) with a little sub just above the Airport

The MacBook Air is a sleek, beautifully designed laptop except for one thing, the hard drive.

In order to achieve it’s thin proportions, the Air uses a 1.8″ hard drive (most desktops use 3.5″ and most laptops use 2.5″)

1.8″ hard drives can be found in iPods, Zunes, and other ultra portable laptops (Sony T Series.)

What makes this 1.8″ drive even more expensive/ hard to find special is that it is very short (5mm instead of the standard 8mm) and uses different ZIF/LIF connectors depending on the rev. This can make upgrading or replacing the hard drive in the Air difficult.

So what drives and external enclosures work for which MacBook Air?

Rev A MacBook Air (Original MacBook Air)

There are 2 drives that we know will fit and work in the original Air. An 80GB Samsung that we install for $245, and a 64GB Samsung SSD (pictured) that is so expensive, that we don’t offer or recommend purchasing.

These drives are PATA and use the 40 pin ZIF/LIF connector. External enclosures for these can be found here and here.

Rev B and later MacBook Air (Late 2008 to 2009)

There are two drives that we know will fit, a 120GB and a 128GB SSD (available from Apple or AASPs like ourselves.) The interface is a SATA II LIF 1.8″ 5mm and we have not been able to find a compatible external enclosure.

Right now, most 1.8″ connections are proprietary to the laptop manufacturer (Sony and Lenovo use one interface, Apple uses another.) As more and more ultra-portables come to market, we should see some more standardization in the drive height and connectors (more capacity, lower prices.)

In the meantime, we’ll announce when any new MacBook Air compatible drives become available.

[ MacBook Air Repairs & Hard Drive Upgrades ]

MyService has the new Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750GB 5200RPM drives in stock for the MacBook Pro.

These drives are slightly higher than standard 2.5″ drives but fit perfectly in all Unibody MacBook Pros, the 13″ MacBook Unibody and the 17″ (Silver Keyboard) MacBook Pro.

These are the largest mobile drives currently available.

They have 8MB of cache, 12.0ms seek time and use the 3Gb/s SATA interface.

In Stock: $375

Includes: Free shipping, professional installation, data transfer and a 3 year warranty.

This upgrade will not void your Apple warranty. Use your old drive for backup.

Check out our hard drive upgrade page for details.

MyService is giving away Mac OS X Snow Leopard!

From now until the end of August, we’ll include a free retail copy of Mac OS X Snow Leopard with any MacBook, MacBook Pro or MacBook Air hard drive upgrade.

Here’s how it works:

Place an order for any hard drive upgrade (for intel Macs) between 8/26 and 8/31, add the Snow Leopard upgrade, and enter the promo code SNOW.

We’ll install Snow Leopard for free, migrate your data and you’ll get to keep the retail copy.

[ MyService Hard Drive Upgrades ]

Over the life of your Mac, there’s a good chance that you may see the following message:

This alert means that you either need to make some room on your hard drive (by deleting files) or upgrade to a bigger drive.

But how full is too full? And how much free space should there be on your hard drive?

Apple states that for optimal performance, 25% of the available hard drive space should be left free for the system to use. The system uses free hard disk space as virtual memory to help speed up and work with open files and apps.

While 25% may seem high, you can really start to notice the system slow down when you approach the 15% mark, especially when working with large files.

When the hard disk has less than 10% free space, the above message will pop up. If you add files until the disk is full, you risk complete data corruption (happened to me) and data loss.

The first step when you see the above message is to check for any duplicate files or for video files you no longer need (these tend to be some of the largest files) and delete them.

The next step would be to get a new, larger drive installed for your Mac.

[ MyService Hard Drive Upgrades ]

Late last week we saw the release of 1TB and 750GB laptop hard drives from Western Digital in the 2.5″ form factor for laptops. The Scorpio Blue line doubles the previous storage capacity available for mobile hard drives. Featuring a 3Gbps SATA interface and 5200RPM spin rate, the performance should be impressive.

But there’s currently one catch that will prohibit them from being installed in current Apple machines (and most other laptops). They are 12.5mm in height, and most laptop drives are 9.5mm. This makes them too large for installation in current Apple laptops. Don’t be discouraged, there’s good news from all of this.

The same situation happened when Western Digital released 500GB hard drives a few years back. They were the first to the market with the 12.5mm form factor, but regular height (9.5mm) drives weren’t far behind.

Stay tuned for a post when these drives get released in the (Apple compatible) 9.5mm form factor.

[ Western Digital ] [ MyService Hard Drive Upgrades ]