replacing a macbook pro internal disk

Chuqui 3.0: Another sad chapter in the storage woe chronicles:


What model drive did you go with to replace your internal MacBook Pro drive? I’m considering replacing mine, too.

Pulling this forward from a comment into a posting.

I ended up going with the Hitachi Travelstar 5400 250Gb, from OtherWorld Computing. I’ve had pretty good luck with hitachi mechanisms, and the choice came down to either that the Hitachi 200Gb 7200 RPM, and the Toshiba 250Gb 5400. I ended up going with “more disk” over “faster disk” mostly because my history with disks is they tend to fill up faster than I expect — with my digital photography, that’s even more true, and frankly, I hate trying to maintain multiple libraries, it’s one more hassle that I’d like to avoid if I can, so fewer, larger disks pays back in fewer hassles for me.

As a helper to replacing it, since on the MacBook Pro it’s not “user replaceable” part, I printed out and kept handy this guide from ExtremTech. Very well done piece, actually. the replacement is far less hairy than some systems Apple has produced in the past, it’s pretty straightforward if you’re careful and are a little comfortable with doing this kind of thing (hint: if you are at all not sure, find someone else to help…).

The only gripes I have is that there were at least five different screw form factors involved, and about 25 screws total. And that wouldn’t have been so bad except for some odd reason, TWO of the screws are torx heads (t-6) instead of standard head. That seems non-sensical to me, to be blunt; no real reason why they couldn’t have been normal screws.

Also, when you open it up, be careful with the keyboard cable. It’s no biggie, just take it easy. It’s taped down to the motherboard but you can remove it easily and replace it easily, but if you move too fast or pull hard, you could cause yourself some pain.

And for some reason, while the keyboard is taped down, the cables for the disk drive are actually glued to the disk (well, maybe double-sided tape, hard to tell). I had to pry them off carefully with an X-acto. Again, nothing too serious if you’re careful, but DON’T PULL. get something flat underneath them and lift. Why that wasn’t taped, I dunno.

Total time for me to do the migration — about three days in my off hours. Why? Backups. I had three images of the disk (original, new cloned via Superduper, spare cloned via superduper) AND a DMG image (via superduper), plus the time machine backup. Paranoid? damn right — and I’ll continue to be, given the alternatives.

Actually time from shutting down the mac to powering it back up? about an hour. Taking it carefully.

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  • http://profile.typekey.com/ianbetteridge/ Ian Betteridge

    Oh, and one more tip which I picked up from somewhere – use stick tape to attach the screws to the printed-out copy of your instructions, next to the pictures, as you remove them. That way, you have an easy way of knowing where exactly they came from and what order to put them back in.

  • http://profile.typekey.com/ianbetteridge/ Ian Betteridge

    I went for the same Hitachi, and am very happy with it. It’s a little noisier than the 100GB version it replaced, but other than that, it’s great.
    One thing to remember: make sure you format it with a GUID partition table, rather than Apple Partition. Although you can happily clone your old drive back to something formatted with Apple Partition, and it will boot perfectly well, you might be storing up problems for later. When I upgraded my disk to Leopard, the installer refused to do a simple upgrade because of the partition table, and I had to repartition it – which meant a complete wipe-and-install.