The Mac is Dead, Long Live the Mac

My Macbook suffered the first hard drive crash I've ever had. 3 trips to the Genius bar in three days and now I'm waiting for a new hard drive on order. To get up and running quickly I bought a Western Digital 320GB hard drive that is so much faster than the standard drive that ships. It runs a little hotter and more vibration can be felt through the aluminium unibody and certainly noisier but the better performance is worth the trade off.

If I had to do it again, probably a 500GB 5400rpm drive would have been better than a 320GB 7200rpm. The throughput of the larger drive is certainly slower but not by much because of the greater density of data and probably more drive heads. In return, the drive is much quieter and less noisy.

But for now, just happy to be up and running again. 3 days of not writing software is an eternity.

For the most part, I was able to keep all my data intact and ported. The best thing about the Mac is that is Unix based so just copying your user home directory will get you 90% of the way there. Unlike Windows, there is no registry settings that get lost. Everything is pretty much under your user directory.

Note to anyone who thinks that just backing up your home directory is enough, there are other user created data areas like MySql databases or network configuration files for Apache etc that reside outside your home directory. These will have to be backed up too.