Upgrade Internal Hard Drive ATA-SATA?

Serial ATA is SATA, yes.

Google 'Crucial' or 'Other World Computing' for retailers that will supply HDs. You can tell them the model number of your machine and they'll check its compatible before you buy.

You just need a 2.5" x 9.5mm SATA drive - and there are a lot to choose from. You may want to narrow your search down by deciding how much drive capacity you need, and then go shopping. Amazon, Crucial, OWC, Newegg, lot's of places to choose from.

Personally, I prefer Seagate drives over most other brands. I've had some bad experiences with Western Digital.

Good luck - call back if you've any questions.

Clinton

SATA I 1.5 Gb/s 😢

Best you can do is a 7,200 RPM hard drive, SSD is a waste of money unless its on SATA III

Remmeber to clean behind the fans (don't remove the cable) while your inside, they are likely clogged up.

Install/upgrade RAM or storage drive in Mac's

If you revert your machine to Snow Leopard, it will run better.

How to revert your Mac to Snow Leopard

How to erase and install Snow Leopard 10.6

Yes, a hybrid drive would be faster than a stock 7200 rpm drive itself. Seagate makes some good ones. Try shopping at Amazon.

Clinton

cbein wrote:

Will a seagate SSD hybrid be compatible? If so, will a hybrid be better than a normal hd?

Problems with this drive have been reported, also again you only have a slow SATA I interface, so your data pipe is too narrow to handle anything faster.

All parts of a computer have to be fast to have a fast machine.

Also your machine is nearly 5 years old, that's about the expected life expectancy for a laptop.

Your pouring money down a drain investing too much into it.

Pop a 7,200 RPM drive in there and install Snow Leoaprd + upgrade to Lion again and run it for the few short time it has left.

When it dies you can take the drive out and put it into a external enclosure and Migration Assistant to a new Mac, then erase the external drive and use it for storage, backup or clone.

Your really looking at buying a new Mac soon, beause something else is going to go on that 2008 soon, likely the video card.

I would like to add some thoughts here if I may:

the sata is 1.5GB/s as ds_store correctly mentions. A SSD that is downwards compatible to that, will certainly give a speed boost, but:

There are a lot of problems with "hybrid" drives especially Momentus XT, and they also have to be downwards compatible to 1,5GB/s (which they are not mostly).

SSD's are totally different animals than HDD's, you must read about the differences first before you decide to install them, I would not even think about it in your situation. The advice of ds_store is very good: install a fast HDD and of a good brand, cheap and easy. Clone before you put it in and this operation is done in half an hour.