Swapped the hard drive in my Macbook Pro today
Category MacBook
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It boils down to following the instructions on extremeTech.com. The most difficult thing was finding a Torq 6 screwdriver - one of my mates had one, after striking out in the local hardware stores. Took about 45 minutes, and a little bit of wrestling with the keyboard/lid. Now I've got a 200gb instead of 160gb, and more importantly a 7200 rpm and 16m cache drive instead of a 4800/8mb. Its a bit snappier, for sure. Eclipse and Notes 8 especially.
After doing hard disk swaps on PC's, I was expecting a world of pain in terms of imaging the disk. Nope. SuperDuper! did a fantastic job of initialising, imaging and making the disk bootable.
Its true you know, its just easier on a Mac.
Comments
Thinking too about a disk upgrade but also looking at handing it down to the teen and getting a new machine post WWDC announcements.
Posted by Peter Herrmann At 13:08:39 On 16/05/2008 | - Website - |
Which drive did you choose, specifically? Toying with the same upgrade myself...
Posted by Rob McDonagh At 14:35:18 On 16/05/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Jason Hook At 09:10:08 On 17/05/2008 | - Website - |
320GB 2.5" Western DIgital Scorpio 5400RPM SATA Notebook HD 8MB Cache (via macsales.com).
No 7200 (not really needed for a 2.5"), but a whopping 320Gb ! Having installed Boot Camp, I now have 160Gb for Mac, and 160Gb for Vista. Works like a charm.
Posted by Theo Heselmans At 16:58:01 On 17/05/2008 | - Website - |
Had the machine on all weekend (whilst I was away) - no worries. Full day of work on Friday and all morning today - no worries.
The machine isnt running hotter, and when I ran it on battery, no difference.
The original fixit article has a number of links showing the power consumption to be on par or lower (depending on operation) which is nice.
Theo - 160gb for Vista ? Thats a lot of wasted space, surely ?
Gone are the days when I let an MS operating system touch the metal. They're all installed in nice, safe vmware environments now.
---* Bill
Posted by Wild Bill At 09:49:25 On 19/05/2008 | - Website - |
I've been looking at that exact disk for a while now. Keeps dropping in price so the pain factor for getting the boss to agree is lower.
My Amiloxa takes 2 drives. It was a matter of 2 minutes to open the drive bay (with a standard philips screwdriver) and slot the second (250gbyte WD) drive in. Just as well, they're both running low but only because I have a Vistax64 partition on the second drive which I boot from the second disk.
I really could do with the 7,200 though.
Just as a pointer, for Torx6 and Torx4 screwdrivers go to ebay. Get them now, they're cheap and you can keep them for these fiddly jobs. Torx4 are a must if you want to strip and clean a mobile phone.
Posted by NeilT At 11:03:59 On 21/05/2008 | - Website - |