Upgrading a MacBook Hard Drive

My daughter has a 13" MacBook that we got her at the start of high school.  She is now in her Senior year, and the deal we have with her is that if she can keep this machine alive until next year, we'll get her a new computer as she heads off to college.  She shoots a lot of photos, though, and keeping a large working set on her machine requires frequent swapping out to our home server.  I finally decided this weekend that a relatively cheap and easy mid-life kicker for her computer would be a hard drive upgrade.

The MacBook originally came with a Seagate 160 GB, 5400 RPM SATA drive.  This weekend, Fry's had the Seagate Momentus 500 GB, 7200 RPM SATA drive on sale for $69.99.  Poking around a bit, I found this blog post that describes exactly what I wanted to do.  Getting it all set up to back-up the drive really did take only a few minutes.  And the Carbon Copy Cloner software really is great, free for download with a donation requested.

Once I had the new drive connected externally with a USB to SATA interface, it took about 5 hours to clone the 160 GB from the old drive to the new one.  When I swapped the new drive into the housing in place of the old one, the machine booted right up with the OS completely intact.  It was very straight forward, just like Mac stuff is supposed to be.

The one thing that was notable is a hierarchy of obscurity for the closures as you get into the machine.  To open the battery compartment, you need a coin.  To remove the door that covers the memory slots and the drive bay, you need a #0 (tiny) Philips head screwdriver.  To swap the hard drive out of it's sheet-metal mounting bracket, you need a Torx T8 driver.  That last one surprised me a little... Why did they go with the obscure Torx screw in stead of another Philips head?  It's not enough to prevent swapping out the drive, just enough to make it inconvenient, unless you happen to have a set of Torx drivers at home.

My daughter is very happy with the 3X increase in drive capacity, and the 33% increase in rotation speed has also nicely improved the perceived speed of the machine.  With a bit of good luck, this will take her through her AP Studio Art Photography program and the remaining 8 months of high school.