My MacBook has served me well for 2.5 years. I had been planning to upgrade to a MacBook Pro but after a careful look at my financial commitments – an iPhone 5 upgrade, upcoming renovations and moving in to our new house, plus baby Zack – I decided upgrading to a new MacBook Pro would be burdensome for me. So instead I chose to upgrade the components of my existing MacBook.
I had already upgraded my RAM and replaced the battery, so this time I decided to replace my hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD). Why SSD? A SSD read and writes faster than a regular drive, which results in better performance for doing operations that involve reading and writing files. A SSD also promises better battery life and less heat. Check out this video of a SSD reduces boot times.
Installation Steps
Replacing a hard drive in a MacBook is a simple process that only involves 5 screws. See iFixit’s excellent guide for detailed steps with photos. Update: You can use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper – both of which are free and excellent – to clone your old hard drive to the new SSD before swapping them. Also, make sure you have the right tools:
- Torx screwdriver (left)
- Philips head screwdriver (right)
Click the images for full resolution versions.
