Performance hit of installing a new hard drive in a MacBook Pro I have a MacBook Pro 5,3 with a 7200 rpm 500 GB hard drive. I am running out of space and I have been considering upgrading with Western Digital's 1 TB laptop hard drive. I am just curious if I am going to get a big hit to my performance.

This is the hard drive I am looking at:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136545
ATTENTION

You do not specify a MacBook pro, but mine (pre-unibody) it ca not take those drives as you can read it has 12.5mm height and the maximum of a MBP Drive is 9.5mm

That is why several 500Gb drives did not fit MBP's and the one you are mentioning will never fit your laptop.



added

Currently, the max capacity on a 9.5mm Hard Drive is 750Gb (WD Scorpio Blue 5400rpm), and SSD is 480Gb (OWC SSD Extreme Pro) --> I bought mine here but 240Gb, it's superb!

to learn how to swap them (unibody, late 2008 models), see this OWC video and if you want to check the performance from an SSD and a HHD, please check this video.

my own SSD: