Just upgraded my macbook pro with a newly-available 500GB 2.5″ SATA 7200 RPM drive. It was simple and quick and now I have more, fast space on my internal hard drive.
Here are the steps:
- Purchase the drive – I got mine from macsales.com otherwise known as Other World Computing.
- Attach the new drive as an external drive in an external chassis. Fortunately I already had one, but OWC also sells those. Something like this would do the trick. (Note that Firewire is faster than USB but that both would work.)
- Use Disk Utility (it comes with Mac OS) to format the new drive. I chose partition-> 1 partition, Mac OS X Extended (Journaled), then pushed the “options” button and chose “GUID Partition Table” as this is an Intel-based Macbook.
- Use Disk Utility to copy the internal drive to the new external drive via the “Restore” option along the top of the main window. This step took ~2 hours using FW400, copying about 200GB of content from the old disk to the new.
- Halt the system, remove the old hard drive and replace it with the new drive. Fortunately on the new MacBook Pros, this is easy. The old systems were challenging to get into and to change disks in. Although again OWC has the directions.
- Boot the new system and revel in its speed and free space!
