Disk Upgarde for My MacBook Pro
Kept running out of room on my MBP’s 80GB hard disk, so I decided to upgrade the hard disk. My trusty neighborhood Mac vendor quoted me S$80 (about US$50) labor, plus another S$10 if I want the data backed up and restored. And this is on top of the price of the 2.5″ SATA hard disk.
Pulling up the iFixit guide to MacBook Pro, I was ready to go:
- Pick up hard disk. Being the greeedy sort, I opted for the Hitachi TravelStar 7K200, featuring 7200RPM (I like them fast) and 200GB (actually more like 200,000,000,000 bytes. Which is quite a bit smaller than 200GB). Sets me back S$390 at Funan.
- Bought the Torx T6 screwdriver. You might think you already have some Torx screwdrivers but this is a really small one. S$15.70 at Sim Lim Square for a whole set, though I needed only one. And this is only for 2 screws on the MacBook Pro.
- Back up disk using SuperDuper! to an external disk image. Made sure you eject the backup disk image before shutting off the external disk. When I forgot to do this, the whole image was not usable. Took me a few days to reconstruct my disk.
- Followed the iFixit instructions, pretty straight forward except for the last part of jiggling the top cover off. Need to be patient with lots of jiggling to get it to loosen.
- Reverse the process.
Except for the top cover, the whole process is quite doable. Needless to say, i) make sure you take out all the screws and done skip a step, ii) arrange the screws nicely so putting it back would be smooth.
Now the MBP is more responsive and the extra space is very nice. Well worth the upgrade.
One question though: what’s the best way to restore the hard drive? I ended up reinstalling the system, and copying the files from the mounted backup disk image.
