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I have the above hard drive and was wondering if it is even worth installing it into my old 2009 MacBook Pro and if it will even fit.. I am trying to get a little extra speed. Would this increase it at all?
Should be faster in loading up than the stock apple HDD that comes in the MacBook. You’ll need to take out the Samsung Spinpoint 2TB 2.5” HDD out of it’s hard drive enclosure then you can fit it on the MacBook. MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Mid 2009 Hard Drive Replacement
I like the 2 TB Samsung Spinpoint drive! I had two in my Mac mini as a media server. I later on upgraded to SSD’s as the system ran hot with two of these installed. While you’ll get a bit more performance out of the Spinpoint drive, its still just a standard HDD. A better direction would be to get a hybrid drive (SSHD) that will give you the boot up zip and can also improve your apps as well. The only rub here is you need to find the older version of the 2.5” Seagate Momentus XT SSHD drive as the current version Seagate FireCuda SSHD won’t support the older SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) interface your system has. I’ve picked up some reconditioned drives for $25 so it might be worth the effort if you want something better.
Yes, you can use that hard drive and yes, you will experience somewhat faster speeds by roughly 30%. The stock hard drive used in this model is a 250GB, 320GB, or 500GB 5400 RPM 2.5” SATA hard drive. The one you are considering replacing it with is a 7200RPM 2TB 2.5 SATA hard drive. The higher RPM speed will slightly improve things, but not to a point where you’d really notice any major difference. While you will definitely gain more storage than what came with your 2009 MacBook Pro, you will not gain any great speed improvement from using that hard drive. If speed is what you’re after, you should install a 2.5” SATA SSD. I have upgraded several of this model with 8GB of RAM and a SSD and definitely recommend doing that if you want a faster system.
