In case anyone is wondering, this drive fits any Unibody MacBook Pro, including the 13", which is what I've installed it in. It also works on the pre-unibody 17" MacBook Pros.
WD 2.5" drives have always worked really well for me. This one is quiet and low power. It's not the fastest drive, but I'd rather have longer battery life than a faster drive. And of course as of this writing, it's the largest drive available at 1TB. Also, Disk Utility on OS X does format the drive to 1TB (minus a few MB for directory structure an such). Other platforms may format the drive to a much lower size (like 750GB) because this drive uses a new sector format, but this isn't an issue on OS X.
Finally, I can have my whole iTunes collection on my MacBook Pro! Western Digital 1 TB Scorpio Blue SATA 3 Gb/s 5200 RPM 8 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Notebook Hard Drive - WD10TPVT
I have had no issues and am very pleased with this drive. This is the largest capacity 2.5" drive currently available on the market and is the SATA drive I have been waiting for (unlike the 1TB hard drives inside Western Digital's 1TB Passport that has a soldered USB connection).
The drive is 12.5mm high compared to standard 9.5mm (due to 3 platters instead of the usual 2). The physical height is clearly advertised and I don't think anyone should penalize the rating of this drive simply becuase they didn't check before buying! The product is not at fault.
Just to be clear -- the drive will NOT fit into most laptops/notebooks with hard drive bays designed to snugly fit a standard 9.5mm drive. My Dell E1505 notebook is a perfect example: I unscrewed the existing hard drive and it is pretty obvious there isn't any space in the bay for an oversized 12.5mm drive. My Asus G51j on the other hand has a deeper drive bay and will fit the 1TB drive no problem. The drive can also fit into hard drive caddies that slot into the optical bay of a notebook IF you have the correct type of caddy.
I have write transfer rates of over 60MB/s as I copy files across to this drive for backup (I expect the transfer rate to slow down a bit as the drive fills up). The drive is very quiet and the operating temps are fine (I've seen it get up to 105F under heavy load versus advertised operating tolerance of up to 140F).
I purchased this drive for my 2009 Unibody 17" MacBook Pro and it rocks. It's speed is between the 7200 RPM 500 GB and the 5400 RPM 500 GB drives that come from Apple, but it is twice the storage. the 12.5 mm hight fits well within the Unibody MBP and the swap-out was quick and painless. I used CC Cloner to clone my Macintosh HD, then did a disk repair and permissions repair. After that I shut down, swapped drives, booted up and was in business. I had spotlight re-index the drive and ran the daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts and I have to say that the drives performance is great. It is great on battery power, quiet, and runs at a cooler temp. Oh, and did I mention it is a full TB of storage? I have a few VMs of Windows and Linux operating systems that take up lots of space and even still, I have tons of free space.
I highly recommend this drive for anyone needing to expand their internal capacity.
I was really excited about this drive and its price so ordered it. When it came, I discovered that the Amazon listing neglected to mention that it is 3.5 mm thicker than regular 2.5" drives. This is apparently true of all 750GB and 1TB out there currently. Most laptops have only 9-9.5 mm slots (2.5 inches by 9 mm). These high capacity drives require a little more thickness and many laptops cannot accommodate them. Be warned. Another problem is consistency in labelling. We measure the width of the drive in inches (2.5, 3.5, etc), and so the height is often reported in inches. However, due to the difference between metric and English systems, it may not be clear whether the drive is 9 mm or 12.5 mm. It depends how the thickness is rounded off during unit conversion. BE CAREFUL! I did have an enclosure that could accommodate the drive, and so I am using it as an external drive, and it seems to work fine. That just isn't the purpose I bought it for.
I installed this in my 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro (late 2008), which as others have said fits fine. My previous hard drive was a 7200rpm 500GB drive. Doubling my previous drive with this drive was a great upgrade for capacity, but the speed is noticeably slower to me. Both this drive and the previous drive are encrypted with PGP Whole Disk Encryption, which also plays a small role. (For the PGP-curious, it took over two *days* to encrypt this 1TB drive.)
At 5200rpm, the spindle in this drive is slightly slower than even stock hard drives, which usually clock in at 5400rpm. The speed difference, coming down from a 7200rpm drive, is disappointing. My system will occasionally hang waiting for the drive -- a rare occurrence on the 7200rpm drive.
However, if you're buying this drive, you're buying for capacity, not speed. Just be aware that, as the only 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive on the market (as of October 2010) the ultra-high-density space comes at a price. - Macbook Pro - 1 Tb - 1tb - Hard Drive'
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