Apple: Hardware News and Discussion Thread
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You sure you didn't have the Santa Rosa architecture 2.4GHz from early 2008? I know that one had the firmware update for 6GB RAM, I just wasn't sure if 2007 models got it as well. And seeing all this SSD talk, I really wish I could afford one in a capacity good for me. My 750GB drive has 90GB free and I don't really like the idea of carrying around an external. I could always take out my optical drive, but I know that I'll end up needing it ONCE, and I also don't want the empty slot on the side of my MacBook Pro. But it sure would make my 2.4GHz Core i7 a lot quicker to use
As for SSD, I've been thinking about doing that for my late 2007 model MBP; however, the issue is that it is a SATA I and I don't know if any current SSDs are backwards compatible with that.
Also, in your specific case, if you are doing a lot of writing to that drive, I would stay clear of getting an SSD. Keep the SSD to help your OS run fast/smooth, and use an external drive as a scratch disk and for data storage, but back that up regularly.
Currently Post-Acura
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SATA3 is backwards compatible, but I haven't been shopping around as to how many drives use that standard, as opposed to those that are made using SATA2. I don't know which version your specific MBP uses, but I believe (could be wrong) that each version of SATA has been backwards compatible, and SATA has been around for years at this point.
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SATA3 is backwards compatible, but I haven't been shopping around as to how many drives use that standard, as opposed to those that are made using SATA2. I don't know which version your specific MBP uses, but I believe (could be wrong) that each version of SATA has been backwards compatible, and SATA has been around for years at this point.
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I would say so. 
I have an 2009 model iMac 27" and an aging late 2007 model MBP which will probably need to be replaced next year sometime. I'm toying with simply replacing it with a 15 Retina MBP and selling my iMac and buying an external display and only having one machine. I really do like my iMac, but having to worry about keeping two computer backed up, migrating data between them, etc. is wasted time IMHO. The only downside of the MBP is having to connect/disconnect it all the time from the external display. It's much easier now with the thunderbolt connector, but that thunderbolt connector has given me a little bit of grief at times on my MBP (non-retina) that I use at work. They aren't built well enough IMO to withstand numerous connection and disconnections. I guess time will tell.
I have an 2009 model iMac 27" and an aging late 2007 model MBP which will probably need to be replaced next year sometime. I'm toying with simply replacing it with a 15 Retina MBP and selling my iMac and buying an external display and only having one machine. I really do like my iMac, but having to worry about keeping two computer backed up, migrating data between them, etc. is wasted time IMHO. The only downside of the MBP is having to connect/disconnect it all the time from the external display. It's much easier now with the thunderbolt connector, but that thunderbolt connector has given me a little bit of grief at times on my MBP (non-retina) that I use at work. They aren't built well enough IMO to withstand numerous connection and disconnections. I guess time will tell.
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I would say so.
I have an 2009 model iMac 27" and an aging late 2007 model MBP which will probably need to be replaced next year sometime. I'm toying with simply replacing it with a 15 Retina MBP and selling my iMac and buying an external display and only having one machine. I really do like my iMac, but having to worry about keeping two computer backed up, migrating data between them, etc. is wasted time IMHO. The only downside of the MBP is having to connect/disconnect it all the time from the external display. It's much easier now with the thunderbolt connector, but that thunderbolt connector has given me a little bit of grief at times on my MBP (non-retina) that I use at work. They aren't built well enough IMO to withstand numerous connection and disconnections. I guess time will tell.
I have an 2009 model iMac 27" and an aging late 2007 model MBP which will probably need to be replaced next year sometime. I'm toying with simply replacing it with a 15 Retina MBP and selling my iMac and buying an external display and only having one machine. I really do like my iMac, but having to worry about keeping two computer backed up, migrating data between them, etc. is wasted time IMHO. The only downside of the MBP is having to connect/disconnect it all the time from the external display. It's much easier now with the thunderbolt connector, but that thunderbolt connector has given me a little bit of grief at times on my MBP (non-retina) that I use at work. They aren't built well enough IMO to withstand numerous connection and disconnections. I guess time will tell.
Yea, my iMac is from 2008 I believe. Works fine, C2D 2.0GHZ, but it's just not cutting it for photos and some of the minimal video stuff I do with the kids activities. Should be able to get a few bucks for the iMac, get an external monitor (already have a secondary 23"), maybe an IPS 27" and call it a day. Have a Macbook Air that I use when sitting on the couch (and travel)....
On the backup piece, what about a NAS running time machine? You can do some replication to/from that? I basically do that with my mac mini, attached 8TB of disk in RAID 5, between my iMac and MBA...
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Yea, my iMac is from 2008 I believe. Works fine, C2D 2.0GHZ, but it's just not cutting it for photos and some of the minimal video stuff I do with the kids activities. Should be able to get a few bucks for the iMac, get an external monitor (already have a secondary 23"), maybe an IPS 27" and call it a day. Have a Macbook Air that I use when sitting on the couch (and travel)....
On the backup piece, what about a NAS running time machine? You can do some replication to/from that? I basically do that with my mac mini, attached 8TB of disk in RAID 5, between my iMac and MBA...
On the backup piece, what about a NAS running time machine? You can do some replication to/from that? I basically do that with my mac mini, attached 8TB of disk in RAID 5, between my iMac and MBA...
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It's not that bad over N, although you really need to be able to connect at 5GHZ to do some decent speeds to move files. I am wired on most devices that are IP based in this house with the exception of my MBA and all the iPhones/iPads (of course). But the throughput on MBA is pretty decent backing up wirelessly.
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Whenever I have tried using my ReadyNAS to transfer large amounts of data, I lose connectivity to it. I don't know if it's a problem with my ReadyNAS or my iMac and haven't been able to replicate it properly enough to diagnose the issue. 
This is the primary reason I wanted to hook it up physically.
This is the primary reason I wanted to hook it up physically.
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Well, it's a done deal. Just bought a 15.4" retina. Heading over to pick it up. Oh and also snagged my Dad a 13.3" MBA. I'm a good son.
If anyone wants a mid-2007 iMac, let me know. $400.
If anyone wants a mid-2007 iMac, let me know. $400.
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did you get the MBA on sale at bestbuy? its $200 off today.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Apple%26...&skuId=4775291
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Apple%26...&skuId=4775291
Last edited by Mizouse; Jan 26, 2013 at 04:09 PM.
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From: Northwest IN
Administrator Alumnus
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did you get the MBA on sale at bestbuy? its $200 off today.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Apple%26...&skuId=4775291
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Apple%26...&skuId=4775291
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So I have a question. I have both a Mac and windows PC in my house. My external drive is formatted NTFS. There's no way I can save stuff from the Mac to the external right?
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There is. You can use Tuxera NTFS. I have Tuxera NTFS and am able to write to my windows partition on my iMac all the time. Although that is an internal drive, it should work just fine for an external drive but please verify with them first if you want to be safe.
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/
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Also worthy of mention, if you run bootcamp and do an upgrade for OS X, you may have to upgrade Tuxera NTFS before your boot camp partition is visible again. I ran into this issue when I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, but didn't have any issue upgrading from Lion to Mountain Lion. When I upgraded to Lion I thought I fuxored my boot camp installation, but I think it was just that the drivers needed to be updated for me to see the Windows Partition from OS X. I didn't try to boot into windows before I fixed the Driver issue, so I don't know if there truly was an issue with the boot camp partition, but better safe than sorry I guess to update it first anway.
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There is. You can use Tuxera NTFS. I have Tuxera NTFS and am able to write to my windows partition on my iMac all the time. Although that is an internal drive, it should work just fine for an external drive but please verify with them first if you want to be safe.
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/
Traded in my MBA 2010 for a 2011, 256GB Drive i5 4GB, then won £400 at the blackjack table next door. Good day in London.
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Ok here's a tip for you! I just bought a 1TB external hard drive, I formatted 500GB HFS+ for Time Machine backups and the other 500GB I wanted to make it so that it could be read and written by both Mac and PC. That used to mean only one option, the FAT32 file format. I'd like to use NTFS but that is Windows only and Mac can only read and not write to NTFS. Even though Mac and PC can read and write to FAT32 I'd rather not use FAT32 because it's a very old disk format that doesn't have advanced features like NTFS. Mainly, it's a 32bit file format can't hold individual files that are larger than 4GB which I do run into.
In comes exFAT to the rescue! It's the newish file format that Mac and PC can write too and it supports files larger than 4GB since it's 64bit like NTFS is. Vista SP1 and newer support exFAT out of the box and you can get drivers for XP and Server 2003 to enable exFAT support. exFAT is becoming the go to format for flash media larger than 32GB like SDXC.
I'm dealing with less and less XP machines so this shouldn't be a big issue.
Here's where you can download exFAT drivers for older Windows OS
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955704
So if you're looking for an advanced cross platform file format that supports large files then I'd go with exFAT!
P.S. A-ha! OS X didn't get exFAT support until 10.6.5! That's why I was surprised when I saw it as a format option in disk utility, I thought it had been there for years but I just never noticed it. Nope, it's pretty recent add-on to Mac. So yeah, you have to have 10.6.5 or higher to support exFAT on Mac
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
In comes exFAT to the rescue! It's the newish file format that Mac and PC can write too and it supports files larger than 4GB since it's 64bit like NTFS is. Vista SP1 and newer support exFAT out of the box and you can get drivers for XP and Server 2003 to enable exFAT support. exFAT is becoming the go to format for flash media larger than 32GB like SDXC.
I'm dealing with less and less XP machines so this shouldn't be a big issue.
Here's where you can download exFAT drivers for older Windows OS
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955704
So if you're looking for an advanced cross platform file format that supports large files then I'd go with exFAT!
P.S. A-ha! OS X didn't get exFAT support until 10.6.5! That's why I was surprised when I saw it as a format option in disk utility, I thought it had been there for years but I just never noticed it. Nope, it's pretty recent add-on to Mac. So yeah, you have to have 10.6.5 or higher to support exFAT on Mac
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
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And seeing all this SSD talk, I really wish I could afford one in a capacity good for me. My 750GB drive has 90GB free and I don't really like the idea of carrying around an external. I could always take out my optical drive, but I know that I'll end up needing it ONCE, and I also don't want the empty slot on the side of my MacBook Pro. But it sure would make my 2.4GHz Core i7 a lot quicker to use
). Hopefully the SSD and caddy should be coming tomorrow so maybe I'll spend tomorrow night working on that since I plan on doing a clean Mountain Lion install. Maybe for the time being I'll just delete all folders but my Users one on my current drive and when I have the time I'll just copy all my files to my external and copy them onto a freshly formatted 2nd drive. I don't trust Time Machine backups just in case something turns out missing. And if only my school would have Windows 8 for free instead of just Windows 7 at the moment
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