I was running out of room on my hard drive, so it was time to upgrade with a Hitachi 250GB 5400RPM SATA drive from OWC ($150 at the time of this writing). I thought about going for a 200GB 7200RPM drive, but the higher data density of a 250GB drive means the performance difference of a 7200RPM drive wouldn’t be significant enough to justify its higher price for less storage.
MacBooks have easy to replace hard drives but the MacBookPro requires you to take apart your laptop. Sounds scary but it really isn’t. Just remember that this will void your warranty so don’t do it unless your warranty has expired.
The equipment and software you need:
- A printout of the upgrade guide for your laptop model from iFixit. Print it in color; laser monochrome photos don’t show enough detail. There’s also a video. For extra details see the Macworld guide.
- Torx T-6 screwdriver.
- Small Phillips size 0 screwdriver.
- Some say you need a spudger to pry things apart but I just used my fingernails.
- An HFS+ formatted external hard drive, or an empty external 2.5″ SATA enclosure to put your old laptop hard drive in. You need this to migrate your data and bootable OSX installation to the new upgraded hard drive.
- If you’re not going to use your old hard drive in an enclosure you’ll need to create a bootable backup on an external hard before you do anything else. You can use SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner, or the built-in OSX Disk Utility to “restore” your current hard drive to your external hard drive.
- Keep your screws in order. Some people use ice cube trays, I just taped all the screws from each step on labeled post it notes.
Here are the steps:
- Create your bootable backup on an external hard drive. This will take 1-2 hours if you aren’t already using incremental bootable backup software like SuperDuper. Skip this step if you’re just going to plop your old drive into an external enclosure and restore from that.
- Follow the iFixit guide for your model to install the new hard drive. This would be a good time to use compressed air to clean out the fans and other innards.
- Boot from your external bootable backup by holding OPTION while you startup.
- Use OS X Disk Utility to partition and format your new internal hard drive. I did the whole disk as “Mac OS Extended Journaled”. If you’re planning on making a partition for Boot Camp this would be the time to do it.
- Use OSX Disk Utility, SuperDuper, or Carbon Copy Cloner to restore FROM your external hard drive TO your new internal drive.
This will take 1-2 hours, so go get some phở or something. - Shut down and unplug your external hard drive before rebooting.
- Enjoy your new huge hard drive.
Not a cakewalk but totally doable. I was extra careful so it took about 40 minutes to field strip and reassemble the laptop. All the data migration takes a few hours but it can be left unattended.
In a future post I’ll talk about backup strategies for your Mac.
Thanks for following along. If you have any questions or tips sound off in the comments.
7 Comments ↓
Great post! Thanks for the detailed how-to.
I’ve had to take apart and replace 3 Powerbook hard drives for friends and colleagues in the last few months. I wouldn’t say it’s tons of fun or anything, but it’s definitely not that big a deal. The Macbook Pro looks like it’s easier to deal with though, from what I’ve seen.
When I have the take-apart guides available, I like to place the screws on their positions on the actual diagrams or photos as I go along to keep track of them.
As for backup, I love that the new version of CCC syncs!
Nice tip re: screw management.
I actually thought the disassembly step would be harder than it was. The most annoying thing was that I didn’t have any Firewire 800 enclosures to help speed the data transfers along.
The silver bullet for backup for me would be Leopard’s TimeMachine that maintained a bootable backup. Supposedly the upcoming version of SuperDuper will work with TimeMachine to do this.
Great post! – Just replaced my 80 gigabyte drive whith a brand new 200 Gigabyte Seagate Momentus – (7200 rpm, 16mb cache) – it works great!
Thanks for putting this up.. I am a PC guy.. and With your instructions I was able to upgrade my 80 gig to 250 gig on a Powerbook G4 Laptop.. Thanks
RYC: Now I know what you were talking about. I guess I just assumed they would all be that easy!
I just stare through the hole to the carpet in those photos, and I shudder.
Now, I know where to come if I have to do this my self. You make it almost sound easy.
Hi Lloyd, it’s more nerve wracking than difficult. I really really hope the next version of the MacBookPro has a “user serviceable” hard drive.
Hard drives die. We need to be able to replace them easily.