How to upgrade your MacBook Pro Hard Drive
October 17, 2008 by Ross McKillop
It didn’t take long, my 80GB Hard Drive only had a a few Gigabytes left on it and there was just nothing else I could delete or move to my external drive. The time had come to replace it with a higher capacity Hard Drive!
My first step was to find a compatible drive and of course a much larger drive, my goal was to get a 160GB Hard Drive so I could double the size of my existing internal Hard Drive. One thing to keep in mind is MacBook Pros and MacBooks both come standard with 2.5 inch 5400 RPM Serial ATA Internal Drives so make sure to get the right type.
I figured the best thing to do was get a drive that came in an external enclosure, this would enable me to transfer my existing information to it easily and make a great new home for my 80GB Drive once it was removed, perfect as a backup drive.
A bit of research and I came up with a nice affordable drive, the Western Digital 160GB 2.5-inch Passport USB Portable Hard Drive
While I waited for my new drive to ship from Amazon I did a bit of hunting around for some instructions on how to get at my MacBook Pros insides. (If you have a MacBook you’re in luck, no tearing apart your Mac!)
Here are the instructions:
Of course I needed to copy my data over to the new Hard Drive, I recommend using Carbon Copy Cloner, it’s free and it works great.
Here are the steps I used:
- Attach your new External Hard Drive to your Mac, using either a FireWire or USB 2.0 connector.
- Format your External Hard Drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) using Disk Utility found in your Applications -> Utilities folder.
- Open Carbon Copy Cloner and select your Internal Hard Drive as the Source Disk and your external Hard Drive as the Target Disk and then press Clone. The default setting will copy everything.
- Once finished cloning, do a test boot from your external drive to make sure everything is A-OK by restarting while holding down the option key, you will be given a choice of drives to boot from, choose your external Hard Drive.
- Follow the steps in the ifixit.com manuals (links above) to remove and replace your Hard Drive.
- Enjoy your spacious new Mac.
And remember: It’s always a good idea to make a backup of your data just in-case you do something accidentally
Original Author - Michael Kaye
What did you do with the old harddrive? Can you get an enclosure and use it as an external drive?
JP -
Yes, if you buy one like the Western Digital 160GB 2.5-inch Passport USB Portable Hard Drive mentioned in the article, you take the 160GB drive out of the “passport” enclosure, and then put the smaller one back in it.
I hope you didn’t buy that hard drive for $220 because its only $72 at my local best buy. If so, return it and and go pick it up for much cheaper.
@Matt -
No this is actually an older post that I just republished - you’re absolutely right, there are better deals on 2.5 inch hard drives, with or without an external enclosure, to be had.
I’ve done this on my 14″ iBook too. I bought a separate HD and external case as it worked out cheaper from ebuyer.com.
Just one thing I did differently - I did a fresh install of Leopard on the blank drive once it was installed on the ibook, then used Migration Assistant (HD/Applications/Utilities/) to pull the data back off my old drive in the external case. It’s the same program you’d use if you bought a new Mac to get all your stuff off the old one and it takes all your settings, saved passwords etc. across without any trouble.
I wish I bought a a Western Digital Passport before I knew this. I bought a drive without an enclosure but don’t know what one to buy. I previously bought one on ebay and it didnt fit. What enclosure should i get?