This morning I finally bit the bullet and swapped the 120GB hard drive that came in my MacBook Pro when I bought it in Sept. 2006 and replaced it with a 250GB SATA hard drive. I kept filling up the original one and having to delete lots of things — I even had to archive my entire iTunes library to an external hard drive, which was inconvenient at best — and I wasn’t convinced that the machine was running its best with only a few GB of available space. I needed these things to start:
- 250GB WesternDigital Scorpio 2.5 SATA ( $142.99 + $7.95 shipping from OWC)
- A generic USB 2.0 external SATA drive enclosure ($2.99 + $7.99 shipping from TrueIon on eBay)
- The free software SuperDuper
- A 000-size watchmaker’s Philips head screwdriver ($5.97 for an 8-in-1 set at HomeDepot)
- A Torx T6 screwdriver ($5.97 for an 8-in-1 set at HomeDepot)
Now my computer has 135GB of free space — more free space than I had already filled on my old hard drive! For my next log post, I’ll describe the step-by-step process of how I did it, with photographs, mostly because the only instructions I could find on-line were for doing this were for a 15-inch MacBook Pro, and the insides of the two machines are different. Not radically, but enough that I thought there might be other folks who would like to see the insides of the 17-inch before cracking theirs open.My next step will be to upgrade the operating system to Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, and to install the new Master Adobe Creative Suite 3 our school just got — and several parts of which I’ll be teaching workshops on these new versions of this spring! I really had to have the extra space to accommodate those, more than anything else. Of course, it hasn’t help me save disk space to have starting shooting photographs with a 10-megapixel camera this summer!
