How Big Is The Hard Disk Drive On Your MacBook?

Hard drives are bigger than ever. And cheaper by the gigabyte. That’s hardly news. What is news is the size of hard drives for Mac notebooks.

Apple ships a 500 gigabyte hard disk drive for the high end MacBook Pro line, and up to a terabyte drive for the iMac. How much disk space does a Mac user need?

I ask because Western Digital just announced that they’re shipping a whopping one terabyte hard disk drive for notebooks. $250 gets one in your MacBook or MacBook Pro.

Is that a good deal? It’s a good size and the price is comparable to the price of 500 gigabyte disk drives of just a couple of years ago.

To put it into perspective, my very first hard disk was a measly 10 megabyte (circa IBM PC days) and cost a double whopping $1,500.

Worse, as of a year ago, 500 gigabytes was not enough storage for my iMac, let alone my MacBook.

I took the jump to a one terabyte hard disk with a one terabyte back up disk (clone), and a triple whopping 1.5 terabyte disk for Time Machine. That’s sufficient storage for now, but at the rate I’m taking video and adding files, and sucking up storage space on YouTube, one terabyte may not be enough.

The main problem with hard disk drive space is my MacBook—using a measly 260 gigabyte drive—is not sufficient for mobile backup. In other words, I can’t keep duplicates of all the files on my desktop iMac on the MacBook.

Western Digital’s one terabyte disk drive changes that. Fortunately, swapping out a hard disk drive in the MacBook line is easier than ever.

The question remains the same. How much hard disk drive do you need for your MacBook; for now, and for the foreseeable future? Instead of pruning files, many Mac users just get a bigger drive. In some things, size does matter.

At the moment, I’m storing files that are over 10 years old, including 9 years of email messages. But the bulk of my Mac’s files come in the form of music, photos, and movies. In iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie, respectively. Almost 600 gigabytes.

I want to be able to back up all those files onto my MacBook. Portability is nice, of course, but so is mobile emergency back up.

If I have to leave the house in a hurry, I’d like to be able to just grab the MacBook and exit the door, knowing that everything is safe in my back pack.

Western Digital’s new Scorpio Blue line of notebook hard disk drives for MacBooks feature WhisperDrive technology, whatever that means. Disk these days don’t make much noise.

Back to the question. How big is the hard disk drive on your Mac notebook? Is it big enough, or are you running out of space? What takes up the most space? How do you back up your MacBook’s disk?