HD Upgrade - Best Value?

I have a base model 2010 15 MBP, 300gig drive.
Having Windows via bootcamp and a few applications and lots of music, I find I am constantly running low on disk space.
I'm thinking I should check out some XMAS/New Years sales and upgrade the hard drive.
Could you guys suggest any good deals (Canadian) on HD's currently, suggest a decent one? Guess I'd be looking for 500gig+.
Thanks!!

 

I'd get a one of those seagate momentus XT hybrid drives.. they are a bit faster since they cache some things in flash memory on them. They come in 500gbs

 

If you need storage, get the 750gb one or I'm sure there will be a 1TB one soon.

 

Newegg has a 640GB WD Caviar Blue for $50 today. Not the biggest or the fastest, but probably the best value right now.

 

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Western Digital 640gb 5400rpm drive is good

 

Amazon has a WD Scorpio Blue 500 GB notebook drive going for roughly $55 bucks. It's got quite a few good reviews on Amazon.

Amazon.com: Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT: Electronics

Or, you can opt for the 1 TB version which I just found on Amazon also ($110 USD):

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1294031530&sr=1-1

Edit: The 1 TB drive will fit in the main HD area for an MB/MBP but not if you use an MCE Optibay (or equivalent) like I was hoping I could do.

 

Hey guys, thanks for the replies...
Two quick questions...

1. As far as I can tell, the difference between the blue and the black (WD) is the cache. Will there really be a noticeable difference in every day use (some gaming, music, internet, some avi file conversions)..

2. Can someone -please- point me to a step by step tutorial for replacing the drive in the current 2010 macbook pro 15"? Not just the hardware aspect, but getting the software/OS reloaded. I'm not worried about losing any data or applications, I have everything backed up, just want to get the new drive in and get the computer back to it's original starting state.

Thanks!!

 

A far greater difference of more importance is the faster rotational speed of the Scorpio Black at 7200 RPM, versus 5400 RPM on the Scorpio blue. The cache size may provide for subtle difference on some applications (~4% speed boost-throughput), but the faster Black will have a much more noticeable difference due to it's rotational speed in most cases. It is at a slight cost though. A higher speed means more power, more heat, and less battery life. You may notice more noise and vibration too, on the faster drive. A good compromise may be to go to a higher capacity, instead of a higher rotational speed. The additional excess capacity provides for smaller aggregate distance movement of the heads, thus providing for less seek time.

 

this is what I have done:
if you have a external drive enclosure, download carbon copy cloner, clone your current drive to the new drive.
Then just swap the drives and you should be good to go, in my case after doing that when i powered on I was stuck at a grey screen for about a minute, then the apple logo appeared and it started booting. It did this everytime I powered on/reset, so I did a PRAM reset and it's all back to normal now.
My external drive enclosure was for a 3.5 SATA drive, but 2.5 laptop drives fit/work no problem in it.

 

Thanks, but I actually don't want the drive to be the exact same - I'm using bootcamp to have dual boot (Windows 7), and one of the reasons for the drive upgrade is so I can re-run bootcamp to give Windows more disk space. So really looking for a guide that will walk me through putting a blank drive in, and getting MAC OS re-installed fresh.
Thanks!

Oh, went ahead and ordered the 500g WD Black from amazon.ca, about $75 shipped..

 

in that case, install the new hard drive, then power on your computer, put the OSX install\restore disk in.
It'll boot off the cd, then start the installer, click the menu bar on top and choose tools, then disk utility. Set it for 1 partition (GUID), and format mac os extended journaled (should be default).
close disk utility, then install OSX using the installer. After it's installed and your back to the desktop run bootcamp

 

Thanks!!!!!!