pat loughery

My Macbook Pro shipped with the large hard drive – the 120gb one. It’s pretty easy to fill that space up with photos and music and podcasts.

In order to free up space, I took the initial measure of moving my iTunes library to an external USB drive. That meant that I had to have my 250GB external drive attached via USB to the machine whenever I wanted to listen to my music library or to synch my iPod. A small hassle, but worthwhile. The main problem with this is that if you start up iTunes without that drive attached, iTunes resets the target path for your music library, and while it’s easy to reset it to your external drive, it takes a few minutes to re-synch.

The next step is the purpose of this post, though. For $100 and less than an hour of time, I upgraded from my old 120GB drive to a 320GB drive, which means I have plenty of free space for music, podcasts to live locally and also to add photos and video on my upcoming trip.

1. Buy a new hard drive. I got mine here at NewEgg. I chose a 320GB, 5400rpm speed drive which cost $99 and had free shipping. I could have gotten a bigger and/or faster drive, but this was a huge upgrade already, and it’s cheap to re-do later if I need to.
2. Optionally but ideally, pick up an external enclosure for your old hard drive. This allows you to use your older, smaller hard drive as a portable backup drive. I always have one with me – I put documents and photographic images on there for quick backups. That way I’ve always got multiple copies of both, even i I’m away from my Time Machine backup system. For less than $20, it’s a great deal for you.
3. Download a free utility called OSCOT for OS X. This utility does one thing really well – it makes a full clone of one hard drive to another drive.
4. Do a Time Machine backup, just in case. If you’re using OS X and not running Time Machine, you’re missing out on one of the best features of the system. I’ve never seen a better backup process. Really, it’s the first time in 20 years that I have never had to think – ever – about when my last backup was.
5. Attach the USB to ISB/SATA adaptor that you got for the external enclosure in step 2 to the new hard drive. Plug into the laptop’s USB port. It’s OK if you don’t put the case around the drive as long as no 2-year-olds in your home are awake at the moment.
6. Run OSCOT and clone your existing hard drive to the newer, bigger drive. It’ll take a while. (I did this overnight).
7. Go bookmark the PDF for iFixit’s excellent article on replacing your MacBook Pro hard drive. I imported the PDF into my Evernote account so that I could have the PDF handy on another machine while I opened up my MacBook. Alternatively, you could also just print it and kill 3% of a tree.
8. Pick up a Torx T6 (T-6) screwdriver, a rubber spudger and, if you don’t already have one, a #00 size Phillips screwdriver. I found my T6 screwdriver at Sears, for $3 or so. I cheated and didn’t use a spudger. Don’t be silly like me.
9. Follow the steps in the iFixit article. One tip: Put the screws you’re removing onto a paper towel – this means that they won’t roll away like they will on your desk/bench, and also you can put them in little group in the order you removed them. Take it from somebody who regularly loses parts when working on motorcycles. The only thing I saw that was wrong about the iFixit directions was in step 14 – there’s no Bluetooth board in that spot on my laptop. Oh, also in step 9 – I apparently lifted the case up too high anyway and panicked because I thought I’d ripped off the ribbon cable’s attachment. I hadn’t.
10. When done with those steps, fire up your machine and make sure everything still works.
11. As the drive boots, OS X will re-index the drive and take a few minutes to do so.
12. Mount the old hard drive into your external enclosure. Initialize it if you’d like.
13. Go to Finder, Ctrl+click on the icon for your new hard drive, and take a Screenshot (Command+4 for a selected area) of the Capacity and Available settings, so that you can feel great about your result.

So, there you go. A lunch hour’s time, $99 for a hard drive, $3 for a new tool and I’ve got – let’s see here – 217GB free? Time to move that iTunes library back to my hard drive and do another big Time Machine backup.

This was so easy I wish I’d have done it a year ago.

Next up? I think I’ll upgrade my 2GB memory to the max 3GB for my era Macbook Pro, again using iFixit’s instructions (although doing the hard drive replacement, you work right around the memory slot). That’ll cost me $70 or under, and take about 10 minutes to do.