MacBook PRO 500 GB HDD & 4 GB Memory Upgrade – back with Time Machine

After almost 1.5 years with my 15 inch MacBook Pro 2.2 GHz in original setup.

With a 120 GB hard disk and 2 gigabyte of ram memory I figured its time for a serious upgrade. I’ve taken way too many pictures in Raw format to still fit them on the small disk and more memory never hurts especially at the low price you get it these days.

So I went for a 2 Gigabyte Ram upgrade replacing the 2 old 1 Gigabyte modules with 2 new 2 Gigabyte ones. That’s the max my MacBook would take by the way.

• Double Data Rate Small Outline Dual Inline Memory Module (DDR SO-DIMM) format
• 1.25 inch or smaller
• 200-pin
• PC2-5300 DDR2 667 MHz Type RAM

I got them via Amazon as they had the best price tag for them I could find.

Here is a nice description on how to replace the modules.

Easy as pie really nothing anybody should worry about and hell it made the machine run quite a bit faster. Really everybody should do that.

Now to the hard disk part of the upgrade. As again you just can’t have enough storage I quickly decided for a 500 GB 2.5 hard drive. This little beauty I ordered at my local hardware dealer of choice.

Reminder do make a new OS X Time Machine backup on an external hard drive as preparation first – getting back to normal later is a piece of cake this way.

Where were we? Ah I went for the Samsung SpinPoint M6S HM500LI 500GB 5400RPM 8MB 2,5″ SATA-2 that is perfectly thin enough to fit into the MacBook.

• HM500LI
• Spinpoint M6
• capacity : 500 GB
• interface : Serial ATA 3.0 Gbps
• buffer memory : 8 MB

After some research I found the perfect instructions at ifixt documentation and this video on Vimeo

Macbook Pro HDD switch in HD from max milion on Vimeo.

The worst thing was to get a size 6 torx – that you will need to install the new hard drive. Once I had that the whole procedure only took me about 40 mins.

Now the hard drive was all in place and ready to rock. The next thing was to get OS X and all my applications running again. Lucky me I did backup my system with OS X time machine first thing before taking my MacBook Pro apart. So once the power was connected again and the Western Digital My Book plugged into the USB port we were ready to go. Almost really as if you start the system from the DVD now you have to select the disk tool from the utilities menu first and partition the disk as otherwise the option restore from time machine will not find a hard disk drive to install the backup on. So I did the right thing and partitioned the HDD. Now into the restore from time machine mode and quickly select the latest backup.

It took about 1 and a half hours till the procedure was completed. I did reboot the system and WOW everything was just were I left it – only with 400 GB plus in storage room.

Time to go off and take some new pictures – in raw format obviously