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Update: By now, most of you have figured out that Iomega and LaCie only make the housings, so if the drive itself fails, you have to unscrew the box to see who the real culprit is. Also, anyone voting for IBM can just vote for Hitachi, which bought the whole IBM storage division a number of years ago.

As for those of you who complain that this poll is not scientific, you are TOTALLY RIGHT!!! It's not scientific. Go back to your Science and your Nature for the raw research, cuz over here we're talking about life experiences.

I said "void the warranty" and I meant it. The process I went through today means it'll be harder for me to complain to Apple if things get weird, so be cautious! Given the experience I've had, I think it will get easier and easier to swap HDDs, like RAM, because on the software side, at least as far as Apple goes, installing a fresh 2.5" SATA turns out to be straightforward, and ready for novices.

The key here is that there's no preparation needed for the new drive. As long as you've backed up your old drive to an external disk using Time Machine, you can prepare for the grand opening. I won't bore you with gory details, except to say that I found a good bit of guidance from this dude's blog.
The Process
From here on in, this issue may just as well apply to MacBooks and even iMacs as well as MacBook Pros, so everyone should take note.

Once you open up the system and swap out the drives, you can set the old drive aside, hopefully never to use it again. Assuming all went well, you restart the system and insert an OS X Leopard installation DVD. You won't need the OS installer on it, but you will need it to act as mediator between the Time Machine backup drive and the newly installed blank drive. Once it boots up (you may need to manually restart to get it to work right) follow these instructions CAREFULLY:

1. Choose your language.

2. At the main screen, choose Disk Utility from the Utilities pull-down menu.

3. Select the drive itself and click on Partition.

4. In the Partition menu, select 1 Partition and Options... where you choose GUID Partition Table. Click OK then Apply, then say "yes" to whatever warning comes up.

5. Once you have reformatted the drive, close the Disk Utility window.

6. Do Not Go Forward. Instead, when you see the main Welcome screen, click the Back button, which takes you to the language select page. It sounds silly but DO IT. This shakes the system into action.

7. Once you have reselected your language and are back on the Welcome screen, click Utilities and select Restore System From Backup...

8. The process should go smoothly from that point on. You simply select appropriate disks to copy your chosen backup data from your Time Machine drive to the new internal drive, as shown in the following sequence:

The Back Story
Originally I tried my swap without first clicking back to the language page, and the installer could not find my new hard drive. Disk Utility saw it and happily formatted it with the GUID partition, but even on the second pass, the installer wouldn't show it as a target option. All I got was this hollow emptiness:
I spoke with Jeerun Chan at Western Digital and asked him to try the same process, which yielded the same results. Then I tried it with another virginal hard drive, this time a 160GB SATA from Seagate. Between the two of us, we ran this test on three different configurations, with the same negative results.

The obvious but depressing solution was to just run the Leopard system installer, then use the migration tool to back up from my Time Machine drive. It's fairly smooth, and smart if you want a clean install on your new drive, but it's boring: it takes a few steps, and they're all obvious. I wanted a bit-for-bit dump from backup to new drive, fully automatic.

As I was installing Leopard on my second drive, the phone rang: it was Jeerun with the crazy back-button technique. I don't know how he thought to do it—I don't even think he knows, but the fact remains: when you have formatted your destination drive and are on the Welcome screen, click the back button and the process will work. If you don't click it, well, in our experience, it seems you will fail in your objective.

Obviously, this won't work if you don't regularly do a full system backup in Time Machine. If the omitted folders in your Time Machine options include system files, you won't be able to do this.

In truth, it might make sense to backup only personal files, especially since this process requires a Leopard install disk even to write the whole image back onto the new drive. Chen swears by SuperDuper, which is perhaps a better pro technique, one that doesn't require a system-install DVD. Still, I wanted to see if this major boast of Time Machine was all that it was cracked up to be. It is, and the end result will be tasty, as long as you don't forget that one little catch.

As with my last Time Machine HDD discovery, this one involves a little hocus pocus. While this method works, you may have your own trick, or a more scientific approach. If so, please share it in the comments below, and spare any fellow Mac users a frustrating afternoon.

Thanks to Jeerun and Heather at WD!

WD(R) Demonstrates Highest Hard Drive Density Company Achieves 520 Gb/in2 Areal Density in Demonstration; Result of Ongoing Technology Investments TOKYO and FREMONT, Calif., Oct. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced that it has achieved 520 Gb/in2 areal density — the hard drive industry's highest demonstrated density to date using continuous media. The company revealed the milestone this week at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo after an earlier demonstration in California . Following WD's growing investments in technology the past five years, the company achieved 520 Gb/in2 using its own perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR)/tunneling magneto-resistive (TuMR) head technology. This level of density produces a 3.5-inch hard drive storing 640 GB-per-platter and single hard drive capacities as large as 3 TB. Based on the industry's current density growth rate of more than 40 percent per year, those capacities are expected to be available in the 2010 timeframe. Current industry-leading hard drive densities shipping in high volume are about 200 Gb/in2, as featured in WD's 250 GB WD Scorpio(R) 2.5-inch drive for notebooks and mobile applications, which began shipping in May 2007. "WD was the first hard drive manufacturer to ship in volume the 250 GB capacity point in the 2.5-inch form factor," said Hossein Moghadam, chief technology officer for WD. "Our technology investments position WD with our customers as a leading choice for the highest, cutting-edge capacities. Our top priority will be to remain keenly focused on providing the highest quality and reliability, which customers have come to expect from WD after years of relying on our products." WD demonstrated 520 Gb/in2 density in its Magnetic Head Operation labs in Fremont, Calif., earlier this month. Moghadam added, "The milestone was realized using our current-technology MgO reader, illustrating the extendibility of PMR-TuMR head technology generations into the future." About WD WD, one of the storage industry's pioneers and long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The company produces reliable, high-performance hard drives that keep users' data accessible and secure from loss. WD applies its storage expertise to consumer products for external, portable and shared storage applications.

WD was founded in 1970. The company's storage products are marketed to leading systems manufacturers, selected resellers andretailers under the Western Digital and WD brand names. Visit the Investor section of the company's Web site (http://www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to density growth rates, dates certain capacities are expected to be available based on those growth rates and the extendibility of PMR-TuMR head technology generations into the future. These forward-looking statements are based on current management expectations, and actual results may differ materially as a result of several factors, including: technical and manufacturing challenges related to changes in areal density; changes in technology; business conditions generally; and other risks and uncertainties listed in WD's recent SEC filings, including its form 10-K for fiscal 2007. WD undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect new information or events or for any other reason.

Western Digital, WD and the WD logo are registered trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks herein are property of their respective owner. One gigabyte (GB) = 1 billion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment.

The 3.5" SATA drives for desktops, the WD Caviar GP series, are now available, ranging from 320GB to 1TB. The press release claims that switching to a GreenPower 1TB is "the equivalent of taking your car off the road for 14 days each year." The more believable claim is that you will save "up to $10 per drive per year in electricity costs." So it practically pays for itself, in, like, 30 or 40 years.

Key features:

IntelliPower - A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.

IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration. View demo >

IntelliPark - Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.

Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) - Employ PMR technology to achieve even greater areal density.

StableTrac - The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations.

From the press release:

WD'S New GreenPower Hard Drives Reduce Energy Consumption, Helping Protect the Environment

Company's First One Terabyte Drive Enables Up To 40% Hard Drive Power Savings for Desktop, Enterprise, CE and WD Branded Customers

LAKE FOREST, Calif., July 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/—Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced a new environmentally friendly GreenPower(TM) family of WD(R) desktop, enterprise, CE and external hard drive products. The new GreenPower (GP) family will ship in capacities from 320 gigabytes (GB) to one terabyte (TB), and will save up to 40% in hard drive power consumption, or as much as $10 per drive per year.

Based on extensive customer input toward supporting ENERGY STAR 4.0 compliance and incorporating the latest in engineering technology, WD has delivered the first 3.5-inch hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute. The GreenPower family gives customers more choices when it comes to purchasing hard drives. The initial drive that will take advantage of WD's new GreenPower technology is the WD Caviar GP. The WD Caviar GP 1TB hard drive will first ship in July in the My Book(TM) range of storage appliances, with 1TB desktop channel shipments following in August.

GreenPower versions of WD RE enterprise drives and WD AV consumer electronics drives will ship in volume within calendar Q3.

ENERGY STAR 4.0 computing systems are designed to enable organizations to minimize their carbon footprint as well as realize significant savings in electricity costs. By WD estimates, in certain applications, the new GreenPower platform can save greater than $10 per drive per year in electricity costs. For example, a data center with 10,000 drives can save $100,000 in annual energy costs, and reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons—the equivalent of taking almost 400 cars off the road for a year.

Product Page [Western Digital]

Western Digital has just announced their new WD Scorpio 250GB, a Serial ATA 2.5-inch hard drive for notebooks which, at 3.94 x 2.75 x 0.354 inches, is the largest smallest shipping hard drive in the world. The 5400rpm 12ms read seek time WD Scorpio uses Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, and you will find all its features and price after the jump.

While Fujitsu and other companies have announced similar units, the WD Scorpio is shipping now with capacities that will range from 40GB to 250GB, with a 5400rpm speed and 8MB buffer. According to Western Digital, it gives a 12ms read seek time and 2.0ms track-to-track seek time, with a 4.20ms average latency.

The hard drive features their WhisperDrive technology, which they say "combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to yield it one of the quietest 5400 RPM." That means an average 24dBA while idle and 26dBA while seeking on average. It also has Western Digital's IntelliSeek technology, which basically means a reduction in the motion in the disk which in turn "reduces power usage by more than 60 percent compared with standard drives." We don't know if those "standard drives" are competing drives with similar technologies or Winchester drives from 1974. What we know is the price: $199.99 gigantic amounts of porn and pirated DVD movies not included. – Jesus Diaz

Product page [Western Digital]

Zepto's 6625WD ZNote [Laptopical]

WD40 + Supersoaker [Uneasysilence]

The Spybot can even go through water with its paddle-like wheels, and can handle more payload than the Spybot MK II. Using this against human enemies is great, and its spy capabilities will give its owners a one-up on their opponents. However, in the impending Human-Robot Wars, there's no telling where this guy's loyalties will lie.– Jason Chen

MacroSwiss

The extremely robust 4WD Spybot with flapper wheels [GizMag via Jalopnik]