One of the greatest benefits of having a macbook over a macbook pro was that the macbook was ironically rather easier to upgrade. The MacBook Pro might’ve had more expansion ports, but when it came to replacing the internal hard disk, the MacBook had the distinct advantage. Now, Apple has improved the MacBook Pro’s design, they too are easy to upgrade, apparently. I never intended my Macbook to become my main machine but as my G5 is about 5 years old and I’m waiting for Apple to release an affordable tower… I find myself with having to upgrade what was a very basic spec. 

The original specs of the machine were 2.0ghz, 1GB ram, 80gb hdd and a CDRW/DVD-Rom player. I already added 1GB, wasn’t too sure about adding another 1GB to bring the total to 3GB as it isn’t officially supported by Apple. I have since upgraded 2 iMacs at work to 3GB and the benefits of the extra GB were palpable. 

I have just acquired a 320GB, 7200 RPM WD Scorpio Black. Western Digital are definitely my favourite HDD brand and have had nothing but excellent service form their drives so far (unlike Maxtor for example). Now, replacing a HDD is always more involved than just adding another drive. It’s an involved process in a desktop, for a laptop, it can be even more involved. Besides the physical constraints that make it more difficult to placed a HDD in a laptop, you also need to make sure you have means to transfer your existing data to your new drive. 

To do this you have a few options, including backing up data and installing the OS afresh on the new HDD and then backing up the data. That has the benefits of a clean start, however it’s a lot of work and something, somewhere might go wrong. I chose to clone my old hard drive, or rather I chose to graft the contents onto the new one ( aclone would imply that they were the same size…). If I’m not mistaken, you can create a bootable backup with Leopard’s Time Machine, however if you are on Tiger or wish to use a software tool that suitable for the task, your can’t go far wrong with Shirt Pocket’s Super Duper. I use it at work as I still have Tiger installed and I kind of prefer having more control over he backup process.

HDD model and Back-up tool chosen, next came connecting the new HDD to the Macbook. I had a Lacie 3.5″ external HDD enclosure which I already opened to switch its hard drive out with another (you know you’ve reached a level of geekdom when bareback hard drive adorn different surfaces in your bedroom…). Fortunately, unlike the olde IDE connectors, SATA connectors dont’ require adaptors when switching between 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives. therefore I didn’ need to go into the trouble of procuring a specific 2.5″ HDD enclosure.

The Mac picked up the unformatted drive immediately and asked me to initialise. I prefer initialising the drive even though Super Duper does it again when cloning your drive. It’s always a good idea to give the HDD a name that is similar to your current internal one, in my case I named mine “Macintosh HD Ext”. Using one of Super Duper’s basic built in copy scripts, I began the clone / Back up process. Super Duper proceedd to make an exact copy of the HDD. This is the part of the process where it’s best you leave the machine alone to do its task. If you keep on browsing and working you risk to lose what you’re working on that moment and you will slow the whole copy process down which is already hampered by the slow USB transfer speeds.

Once copied, you can restart and choose to boot from the external HDD. This is an important and invaluable feature of Macs. The ability to boot from external devices has long been a privilege and important aspect of using Macs. If your mac ever develops hard drive problems and won’t boot, your best bet is to boot from a back up. And it’s flexible enough to allow booting the OS from CD, firewire, and most USB HDD’s and in some cases even flash pen drives. 

SO hey it work immediately and was pretty snappy. Next step, the physical removal of the internal hard drive and replacing it with the new one. Well there’s a very easy to follow PDF on Apple’s website which details the process. It’s simple enough to read it once then go off and do it from memory. However, that would be irresponsible. Always print out the instructions or have another computer with internet access handy. The most crucial aspect is to have the right tools for the job and in this case, you will need a Phillips #1 screwdriver and an Allen keys. Actually, Apple’s PDF leaves out the step where you have to  detach the sled from the old drive and attach it to the new drive. For this you need a small (T6 perhaps) Hex/Torx/Allen key. That’s why there are 3rd party guides for this, a quick search on youtube and you’ll soon have even easier to follow instructions. 

Once done, your machine might not boot up immediately and will restart as it can’t find the HDD it knows it should boot from. The machine should boot into a screen with the new HDD’s icon, asking you if you wish to boot from this device. If this screen doesn’t show up, then restart the machine and keep the alt key pressed till the screen appears. Once the drive is selected and your machine boots, it is better if you go to your prefs and specify the startup disk. I also renamed the drive to Macintosh HD. The only difference between now and before? About 240Gb more space, a thoroughly faster and snappier system and a spare 80gb external hard drive for which I’ll get a specific enclosure.

My next upgrades will be a new monitor and perhaps a SATA DVD writer. It’s not something I use often these days as I don’t burn that many DVD’s anymore. My main use was for making PS2 game backups and data transfer. These days I own a PS3 and usb sticks and FTP replace DVDs. Also, replacing the internal optical drive is much more involved. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Apple, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.