Upgrading the hard drive in my MacBook Pro

The MacBook Pro that I got about a year ago came with a 100 GB internal hard drive. This seemed huge, especially compared to the laptop that I had before that, which only had a 60GB internal hard drive. But, lo and behold, a year later, the internal disk was full.

I blame two things for filling up my disk:

• Virtualization: I had both Parallels and VirtualBox installed, but those installations took minimal amount of space. It was the Windows XP, Ubuntu, and OpenSolaris installations that took a lot of space... Unfortunately, I needed these guest OS images, since I use them frequently.
• iTunes and some movies: I have an iPod Touch. But given that my music and videos are as important to me as air (perhaps even more important), getting rid of this stuff is not an option.

So, what to do?

In browsing newegg.com, I found the answer. I would get more than 3 times the disk space, and a performance improvement to boot. And, some of the reviews there talk about how MacBook Pro's perform with this drive. I was sold.

Replacing the hard drive in the MacBook Pro is not as simple as it seems. On my previous laptop (Toshiba Tecra M2), it was trivial - one screw on a side slot, and I had access to the internal hard drive. The MacBook pro is not that simple.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Getting ready from a hardware perspective
   
   There are several things I did to understand what I would need to do and acquire the right tools.
   
   These two web sites were invaluable.
   
   
   • Richard's MacBook Pro Hard Disk Replacement Note
   • The Installation Videos at Other World Computing. I specifically downloaded the video and stored it on my wife's laptop, just in case I needed it.
     
   
   Then I had to get the right toolset - a Torx #6 and a small Phillips head #0.. I knew that Home Depot had these tools (since I actually bought one a while back, but it disappeared in my house), but with gas at $4.50 a gallon, I wasn't willing to make the 20 mile trip to Home Depot just for the screw driver. Fortunately, the local Radio Shack had a toolkit. It had more pieces than I explicitly needed (even ones that I didn't even recognize), but hey, at $16.49, it was reasonable.
   
   I now had everything I needed.
   
   
2. Getting ready from a software perspective
   
   The question I had was, "how do I duplicate the boot disk onto the new disk"? There seemed to be several options:
   
   
   • Using the asr(8) tool built into MacOS X. The suggestion was to boot off the installation DVD with both the new disk and old disk connected (one via an external USB chassis, the other inside the Mac), then use this utility to duplicate one disk to another.
   • Use Time Machine and do a full restore. This wasn't an option for me, since I quickly learned that setting up Time Machine to back up my virtualized Guest OS's quickly fills up the Time Machine backup disk. So on my system, Time Machine doesn't back up everything...
   • Use SuperDuper! This is what I endded up doing.
   
   
3. Getting "mentally" ready
   
   I repeated to myself several times, "I think I can, I think I can, I know I can, I know I can"
   
   A little confidence goes a long way.
   
   The thing I feared the most was breaking the MBP, and not being able to show up to work the next day. I rely on the MBP to perform my job.
   
   
4. A test run
   
   The real question in my mind was, "how long will this take?" I had to allocate that much time to get this done, and make sure I didn't need the Mac during this time period. The only real test run I could do was a disk duplication.
   
   I took the new disk and put it into an external USB chassis I had lying around. I set up SuperDuper! to do a full backup from the internal disk to the external disk, and then boot the Mac off the external disk when it was done. This process took 3.5 hours (!) for approximately 95 GB of data copied. Final data copy rate was around 8 MB/second.
   
   So now I had my answer, I needed approximately 5 hours of Mac downtime to perform the upgrade.
   
   
5. The final leap
   
   Around 6pm at night, I logged off from work, shut down all the apps on the Mac, and started SuperDuper!. I came back around 9:30pm, saw that it was finished, then started the upgrade.
   
   I'm happy to say that by 10:15pm, I was up and running with the new disk. No problems at all.
   
   As for performance?
   
   Not a real benchmark by any means. The current software project I'm on takes approximately 25 minutes to build and run the unit/functional tests. With the new hard drive, I'm down to 14 minutes. Since I do this many times a day, this is a huge productivity benefit to me.

I learned something by reading Richard's notes and watching the video: Pay careful attention to all the screws - amazingly, they are all different. To keep track, used small notepad sheets of paper - 6 of them - labeled as follows. Then, as I took out each screw, I put it on the right piece of paper. This way, I didn't make any mistakes regarding which screw went where.

• Outside memory case
• Inside memory case
• Inside Battery Case
• 4 screws on the bottom
• 8 screws, 4 on each side
• 2 screws on the back

For now, I'm content. I've got a ton of free space. I'll never fill it up!