Note: If you get queasy at the sight of four letter words and their derivatives, stop reading now.
10 GB is not enough free space to do anything with, and that’s all I had left on my MacBook Pro’s stock 160 GB 5400 RPM hd.
I’d heard that it’s not that hard to upgrade stuff in a Mac, it just takes patience or money. That’s all well and good, if you have the money to replace it if you break something – or a decent backup computer. Although I have 3 other computers in the house – one other Mac included in the count, I don’t have a computer to replace this one if I happened to kill my MacBook Pro during the upgrade process. Any mistake spelled doom for my entrepreneurial career.
This was no ordinary hard-drive swap. It was a bomb defusal.
To get Apple to replace the harddrive would cost labor ($60 – Apple, $60 – MicroCenter, $160 – The Mac Shack) plus the cost of the harddrive (between $69-150). Because decent laptop harddrives are so expensive on their own – and if it were any other computer, I’d have no problem doing it myself, it wasn’t really an option for me to spend money on labor.
Warranty be damned; I was doing it myself.
Running to MicroCenter, I picked up a USB enclosure, a computer screwdriver, and a 320GB 7200 RPM western digital harddrive to upgrade with – total cost: $100. I did end up missing one necessary tool – a spudger. Think… one end of tweezers, but not metal. I ended up using the tweezers I had, which worked just fine with a light touch.
I grabbed my trusty HP Mini, saddled up with ifixit.com‘s MacBook Pro harddrive replacement guide, and read up while I placed the new harddrive into the USB enclosure and “restored” (cloned) my 160 GB harddrive to my 320 GB harddrive. Using Apple’s Disk Utility eliminated the need for a third drive while transferring data only once: from original to copy.
Once the transfer finished, I was well-read… and loathing Apple for their innovative, yet fucking hideous internals. Honestly – who GLUES the harddrive ribbon cable down!? And not just that – who fucking glues the sleep light and IR sensor fucking ribbons to the fucking harddrive!? WTF am I supposed to do with that, Apple???
Once I recovered from the shock of just how many screws it would take to get at the harddrive (19), how many ribbon cables I would have to un-stick (2), and how much of an idiot I was for even considering this stupid mission, I started in.
The first thing they have you do is remove the battery and remove the ram shield – which was good, because I didn’t know what configuration the memory was in on this computer (turns out – two 1GB chips – this will be my next upgrade). Once those things were off, you remove a few supporting screws and quite a few body casing screws.
Then the fun begins.
I have to take my huge-ass fingers and “slide” them underneath the top paneling. Yeah fuckin’ right. Worse – I have no earthly fucking idea what’s underneath besides what the pictures tell me. I manage to get the back lifted about 3/4″. The sides are more stubborn, but I work my way down and they slowly come up as well. Now the front… that’s a different story.
Keep in mind, I’ve been using this computer for several hours daily – for the last two years. These panels have supported the weight of my forearms for all that time – and also collected all the gunk and grime that two and a half years bring about. The front of the top panel is fucking glued down – and Apple wasn’t to blame, this time.
I finally managed – with two very loud, very frightening pops, to free the top paneling from the body of the laptop after about 10 minutes of struggling with pressure and leverage and de-gunking as I went along. There’s ribbon cable that connects the top panel to the rest of the laptop, though – and thank God I didn’t yank hard enough to pop anything unfortunate out. I chose to leave that particular ribbon cable attached, despite the instructions telling me otherwise.
Anchoring the top of the laptop casing against my forearm, I maneuvered the tweezers underneath the glued ribbon cable – millimeter by millimeter, until they came free – all 4″ of ‘em.
Finally, I was able to get at the hard-drive. It had only taken 30 minutes and 11 different sets of screws to loosen. I quickly swapped the old harddrive out for the new one, placing the old one back into the enclosure should disaster somehow strike at the last minute.
I slowly put things back into place, retracing my steps the whole way through – and only one screw gave me any sort of trouble. I’m not sure why, but I somehow managed to thread it wrong and it sticks out just the tiniest bit, no matter how hard I try to correct it, I can’t get it right. Oh well – it’s covered by my SPECK case, so I know it won’t be a problem.
Wrapping up, I covered the ram back up, put the battery back in, and turned on the laptop.
It doesn’t boot any faster (I will need a ram upgrade for that, I think), but it sure as hell has more space AND the apps seem to load faster once the whole startup sequence is done.
I did notice one problem – the battery was listed at 55% power and would suddenly drop to 0% and the computer would go to sleep with no warning (the first time it did this, the battery showed 3 green lights). I reset the SMC, checked the power again, and the battery was down to one. Something I did must have discharged the battery quicker than normal (“normal” here is a relative term – the battery is two years old and doing what most batteries that old do – die quickly), and I think changing the RPM of the harddrives requires the computer to do a different calculation for remaining power. Resetting the SMC should have corrected for this.
At the moment, I’m writing this just after having recharged the battery to full. It tells me there’s 1hr remaining, so we’ll see if it suddenly drops out.
All in all, the whole experience was nerve-wracking. The bomb, knock on wood, hasn’t blown up in my face yet – I was exceedingly careful as I did the upgrade, and all the functions attached to those ribbon cables (IR, sleep light, ambient light sensor, speakers, trackpad, keyboard, and everything else, are working just fine.
I’ve got to run a few more tests, but if everything comes out okay, I’m going to declare victory on this one. Not only did I learn something cool, but I also gained the confidence that I can make a tough decision with a high-amount of risk without blinking.
Thanks for the gory details. Man. I’m going to start saving my piddly jazz-music earnings until I get to $60! Actually, if I wait long enough, there’ll probably be a 320/7200 drive built in. Maybe I should save for that
take care,
Brian
Brian Fromme
Hey Nick,
Thanks for the gory details. Man. I’m going to start saving my piddly jazz-music earnings until I get to $60! Actually, if I wait long enough, there’ll probably be a 320/7200 drive built in. Maybe I should save for that
take care,
Brian
Nick has helped these Small Businesses (and more!):
MacBook Pro HardDrive Upgrade
Note: If you get queasy at the sight of four letter words and their derivatives, stop reading now.
I’d heard that it’s not that hard to upgrade stuff in a Mac, it just takes patience or money. That’s all well and good, if you have the money to replace it if you break something – or a decent backup computer. Although I have 3 other computers in the house – one other Mac included in the count, I don’t have a computer to replace this one if I happened to kill my MacBook Pro during the upgrade process. Any mistake spelled doom for my entrepreneurial career.
This was no ordinary hard-drive swap. It was a bomb defusal.
To get Apple to replace the harddrive would cost labor ($60 – Apple, $60 – MicroCenter, $160 – The Mac Shack) plus the cost of the harddrive (between $69-150). Because decent laptop harddrives are so expensive on their own – and if it were any other computer, I’d have no problem doing it myself, it wasn’t really an option for me to spend money on labor.
Warranty be damned; I was doing it myself.
Running to MicroCenter, I picked up a USB enclosure, a computer screwdriver, and a 320GB 7200 RPM western digital harddrive to upgrade with – total cost: $100. I did end up missing one necessary tool – a spudger. Think… one end of tweezers, but not metal. I ended up using the tweezers I had, which worked just fine with a light touch.
I grabbed my trusty HP Mini, saddled up with ifixit.com‘s MacBook Pro harddrive replacement guide, and read up while I placed the new harddrive into the USB enclosure and “restored” (cloned) my 160 GB harddrive to my 320 GB harddrive. Using Apple’s Disk Utility eliminated the need for a third drive while transferring data only once: from original to copy.
Once the transfer finished, I was well-read… and loathing Apple for their innovative, yet fucking hideous internals. Honestly – who GLUES the harddrive ribbon cable down!? And not just that – who fucking glues the sleep light and IR sensor fucking ribbons to the fucking harddrive!? WTF am I supposed to do with that, Apple???
Once I recovered from the shock of just how many screws it would take to get at the harddrive (19), how many ribbon cables I would have to un-stick (2), and how much of an idiot I was for even considering this stupid mission, I started in.
The first thing they have you do is remove the battery and remove the ram shield – which was good, because I didn’t know what configuration the memory was in on this computer (turns out – two 1GB chips – this will be my next upgrade). Once those things were off, you remove a few supporting screws and quite a few body casing screws.
Then the fun begins.
Keep in mind, I’ve been using this computer for several hours daily – for the last two years. These panels have supported the weight of my forearms for all that time – and also collected all the gunk and grime that two and a half years bring about. The front of the top panel is fucking glued down – and Apple wasn’t to blame, this time.
I finally managed – with two very loud, very frightening pops, to free the top paneling from the body of the laptop after about 10 minutes of struggling with pressure and leverage and de-gunking as I went along. There’s ribbon cable that connects the top panel to the rest of the laptop, though – and thank God I didn’t yank hard enough to pop anything unfortunate out. I chose to leave that particular ribbon cable attached, despite the instructions telling me otherwise.
Anchoring the top of the laptop casing against my forearm, I maneuvered the tweezers underneath the glued ribbon cable – millimeter by millimeter, until they came free – all 4″ of ‘em.
Finally, I was able to get at the hard-drive. It had only taken 30 minutes and 11 different sets of screws to loosen. I quickly swapped the old harddrive out for the new one, placing the old one back into the enclosure should disaster somehow strike at the last minute.
I slowly put things back into place, retracing my steps the whole way through – and only one screw gave me any sort of trouble. I’m not sure why, but I somehow managed to thread it wrong and it sticks out just the tiniest bit, no matter how hard I try to correct it, I can’t get it right. Oh well – it’s covered by my SPECK case, so I know it won’t be a problem.
Wrapping up, I covered the ram back up, put the battery back in, and turned on the laptop.
It doesn’t boot any faster (I will need a ram upgrade for that, I think), but it sure as hell has more space AND the apps seem to load faster once the whole startup sequence is done.
I did notice one problem – the battery was listed at 55% power and would suddenly drop to 0% and the computer would go to sleep with no warning (the first time it did this, the battery showed 3 green lights). I reset the SMC, checked the power again, and the battery was down to one. Something I did must have discharged the battery quicker than normal (“normal” here is a relative term – the battery is two years old and doing what most batteries that old do – die quickly), and I think changing the RPM of the harddrives requires the computer to do a different calculation for remaining power. Resetting the SMC should have corrected for this.
At the moment, I’m writing this just after having recharged the battery to full. It tells me there’s 1hr remaining, so we’ll see if it suddenly drops out.
All in all, the whole experience was nerve-wracking. The bomb, knock on wood, hasn’t blown up in my face yet – I was exceedingly careful as I did the upgrade, and all the functions attached to those ribbon cables (IR, sleep light, ambient light sensor, speakers, trackpad, keyboard, and everything else, are working just fine.
I’ve got to run a few more tests, but if everything comes out okay, I’m going to declare victory on this one. Not only did I learn something cool, but I also gained the confidence that I can make a tough decision with a high-amount of risk without blinking.
And that’s a lesson worth saving $60+ for!