High end drive update options for your MacBook/Pro

Apple stocks its MacBook/Pros with a solid array of hard drives that appeal to most Mac users.  But Apple has also made it beyond easy to upgrade your stock drives with something much better.  Below, we’ll list a few of the options you have.

First, consider if you want a traditional hard disk or a Solid State Disk.  Traditional disk drives are much cheaper but are more prone to fail and are usually slower.  Solid State Disks are much more expensive (often  but are also faster and more reliable because they have no moving parts. 

Let’s talk Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) first.

Unibody MacBook Pros can take notebook hard drives up to 12.5mm thick.  Older MacBook Pros usually top out at 9mm thick with a few exceptions (17″).  That’s important because the high end Motebook hard drives are often 12.5 mm thick.  For instance,

In a perfect world, you could boot your OS, prefs and applications from a small solid state disk drive and put your media on a traditional drive.