I bought a refurb MacBook core 2 duo a few years back. It came with the standard tiny 80gig Seagate hard drive. I soon replaced it with a Seagate Momentus 5400.4 250 Gig hard drive, which I have filled and refilled to 90%+, reformatted, dual booted, triple booted etc etc. Installing some free Microsoft software the other day on the Windows Bootcamp partition was the straw that broke the camel's MTBF back. Several freezes and crashes later, it would not boot into anything. Suspicious buzz and click coming from the hard drive. Not recoverable by my means, and I'm not able to commit the bucks for a pro shop to take it apart in a clean room and declare it DOA.

I lost a few weeks of data because I foolishly don't do nightly backups, but most stuff is around. Somewhere...

Canada Computers had the Seagate Momentus XT 500Gig hybrid on sale, so I grabbed one. It's 7200 rpm with a bit of SSD tacked on.
CCC helped me move the system from the 80Gig original to the XT very quickly.
Boot time is much faster, things seems peppier, and my whites are whiter and brighter!
And yes, mom, I'm backing my files up nightly...

Cool with the Momentus XT, I'm quite interested in those. Hopefully a bit more reliable than what Samsung came out with, the SSD portion would be prone just dying all of a sudden rendering the entire drive useless. Regardless, always BACKUP!

Cool with the Momentus XT, I'm quite interested in those. Hopefully a bit more reliable than what Samsung came out with, the SSD portion would be prone just dying all of a sudden rendering the entire drive useless. Regardless, always BACKUP!

The concern I have with hybrid drives are with defrag .. you can not defrag or optimize an SSD with out the fear of damage, so that said.. what happens over time with the platter portion ? it will continue to fragment - then I guess you will have to back up and reformat - copy back after you have optimized it your data on an another drive?
Maybe I am wrong? Please correct me if I am.

copy off, nuke and pave, migrate in using TM. very easy

also i would be very interested to know how a new hard drive would result in "whites being whiter" haha

I have not defragged a Mac disk since the System 7.5 days when Norton Utilities were actually useful.

The concern I have with hybrid drives are with defrag .. you can not defrag or optimize an SSD with out the fear of damage, so that said.. what happens over time with the platter portion ? it will continue to fragment - then I guess you will have to back up and reformat - copy back after you have optimized it your data on an another drive?
Maybe I am wrong? Please correct me if I am.

copy off, nuke and pave, migrate in using TM. very easy

also i would be very interested to know how a new hard drive would result in "whites being whiter" haha

TM can not always be trusted.. I always recommend you test your TM copy to be safe.
I find using TM, then a clone of your data on an external you keep in a safe place but bring out every so often to back up on as a bootable clone is a great second back up.
2 copies is best but if you can afford 3 even better..As the original poster said.. sending it out is ridiculously expensive for recovery.

I usually pave my TM once a year to be safe the drive is in good condition as well as my backed up data.


I have not defragged a Mac disk since the System 7.5 days when Norton Utilities were actually useful.

I still optimize my platter drives.. I run disk repairs and permission repairs regularly, to be safe.. on all SSDs and Platter based drives.
I use Drive genious by prosoft eng.