Appletell

Samsung’s long-awaited 500GB hard drive that fits in all MacBooks and MacBook Pros (as opposed to Hitachi’s, which, at 12.5mm tall, only fits in the 17” MBP) is finally available to order—and it’s cheaper than expected!

I, for one, have been waiting for a 500GB laptop drive since it was first announced way back in January. So when it hit the OWC catalog at MacSales.com, I jumped right on and bought it. The bad news is that OWC only sells it as part of an “upgrade kit,“ which includes an external, bus-powered USB enclosure to use as a new home for the drive you’re replacing. The good news is the price: $287 (plus shipping). That’s a good price for a drive with an enclosure, especially since the initial pricing for the drive alone was supposed to be about $300.

I’ve now happily had the drive installed in my 15” MacBook Pro for a few days now with no problems at all. The enclosure that came with it is nice looking and well-made, though it could stand to be a tad smaller. It was also pretty handy for cloning my drive to the new one prior to installation. Samsung also includes software for this, but I chose to use SuperDuper!, so I don’t know how well the included software works. The enclosure is USB 2.0 only, so my 201GB of data took just over five hours to clone (speeds hovered around 13 Mb/s—your mileage may vary). When I installed the new drive, absolutely everything looked and worked exactly as it had on the old drive, with the exception of how much space I had left! Of course, if you’re not comfortable taking apart your Mac, make sure to pay a professional, Mac-certified technician to do it for you; just do your own data transfer first and save yourself some money. Unfortunately, Apple Store Geniuses will not install third party hardware, so you’ll need to go independent.

So what are you going to do with your extra hard drive space?

Product [500GB Samsung M6 HD]

• Fujitsu’s HandyDrive gets a 500GB storage option
• SimpleTech intro’s the [re]drive, a 500GB ‘green’ external hard drive
• Pioneer takes the leap to a 500GB disc

Mac OS X v10.6 is the first of the big cats to be named for a different breed of a previous version. After all, we didn’t rush out to buy Siberian Tiger this past October. As the naming convention implies, there’s not a lot of difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard, at least as far as the end user in concerned. Apple’s info page is sparse, but at least gives us some insight on what to expect.

Learn more after the break.

MORE »