So the other day, I found my MacBook Pro running a bit slow to load programs and applications. For work, I tend to use all four spaces / desktops in addition to VMWare Fusion running Windows 7 64bit, CS4, and Office. I also don't usually keep all the programs open at the same time as I only have 4Gb of ram at the moment so there is a lot of opening and closing of applications.
I currently run the mid-2009 MacBook Pro 17in. This model came with a 5400 RPM Hitachi 500Gb hard drive, and after quite a bit of research on what Maxtor and Western Digital drives had to offer (and some inherent problems reported), I finally landed on another Hitachi. (I would also like to note that I had no idea what model HDD had come stock with my Mac, and made no decisions based on that.) The model I finally chose upgrade to was the Hitachi 500GB Travelstar SATA 7200 RPM Laptop Internal Hard Drive HD20500IDK/7K - Retail that I ordered direct from Amazon. The drive was delivered in a couple of days, and so the project began.
The first step, was to back up my data, and because the only reason for the upgrade was for speed, I wanted to keep everything EXACTLY as-is. So the question is, how do you move everything from one drive to another on a laptop? It's not like I could just plug the new drive and hit copy. So I ran down to my local Best Buy, and picked up USB to SATA 2.5in external hard drive enclosure. (I didn't plan this part out however, and the one I bought ran about $63.00) I would suggest ordering Vantec NexStar CX NST-200S2-BK 2.5-Inch SATA to USB 2.0 External Drive Enclosure (Black) as this one cost way less and does the exact same thing and you save on shipping.
Now there are two reasons that you will want to pick up an external hard drive enclosure. First, it provides a method in which you can copy ALL of your data over (which I will explain how to do), and two, it makes use of your old hard drive as an external drive for backing up your data or storing additional items on.
Okay, now the only other items of hardware that you will need, is a no. 6 torx, and mini Phillips head screwdriver (you may want to order these as well, but they can be picked up at any computer or hardware store).
Now when your drive and external drive enclosure arrive, you will want to follow the directions and place your newly ordered hard drive in it and connect it to your computer via the supplies USB cable. When you do, your Disc Utility Application should open up (if it doesn't, then find it under Applications > Utilities). You will want to select your new hard drive on the left, then name whatever you want to call it. I suggest making it slightly different so you don't confuse them. Just above where you named your new drive, you will have formatting options. Choose Mac OS Extended (journaled), then click Erase. This mode will allow your new drive to become bootable with the install of your Mac OS X.
Once your drive is formatted and erased, you will need to copy all of your data over. To do that, you will want to use Carbon Copy Cloner. This software is extremely easy to use and best of all, it's FREE. When you open it up, it you should see this.
You will want to select your source disc, which will be your existing hard drive that came with your MacBook, and select your target disc, which will be your new drive. The default option is to Backup everything, and you will want to keep it on this setting and click Clone on the button below. This process will run for several hours, mine took over 8 hours to complete. What this is doing, is literally cloning your existing hard drive to your new one. This will copy your OS, all of you settings, all of you docs and photo's, everything. When this is done, you will be able to remove your existing hard drive, place this one in it's place, turn on your computer, and everything will be exactly like it was when you turned off you MacBook to remove the existing hard drive.
Now we need to swap the hard drives. This is very easy, just follow these steps.
Remove the screws on the back of your MacBook like so.
Now remove only the 2 screws as seen here. The back 2 screws can stay where they are and don't need to be removed in order to remove the hard drive.
Disconnect the drive, then you will need your no. 6 torx driver. Remove the 4 screws from your existing hard drive and screw them into the new hard drive.
After that, put your new drive back in your MacBook, close it all back up, turn it on, and you are good to go. It is really just that easy.
I noticed a huge increase in load times on programs such as VMWare and CS4 applications. The new drive is extremely quiet and does not appear to use much more power than the old one.
This article written by http://iPadtrend.com from Adam Zilko. You can find this article and more under the http://ipadtrend.com/category/tutorials/how-tos/ section of the iPad Trend website.
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