Macbook Pro Harddisk upgrade / replacement
18/10/08 10:45 Filed in: Macbook
Today I upgraded the harddisk in my
Macbook Pro 15”, from a 320GB 5400rpm to a 320GB 7200rpm drive.
This is a separate upgrade from the one that I have previously
wrote about, the idea behind this upgrade was to remove a
bottleneck with the 5400rpm drive and speed up the system as
opposed to gaining more space - even though more space is alway
good!
In fact, I saw that there is currently a 500GB 2.5” drive available and while I was sorely tempted, it only runs at 5400rpm, even so, I was still considering it but what decided it for me was that I realised I dont have another 500GB drive available to clone it to, in order to make backups in the future.
At home I basically have the 1TB TC, which we are using with time machine but I also like to make clones using Superduper or Carboncopycloner, partly so that I have another type of backup to recover from, should the need arise, also so that I dont have all of my backups on the same HDD and finally because in an emergency, I could boot from the clone and work immediately, without having to wait for a restore to finish. Then afterwards I can restore either from the clone or the TC.
So that being said, I committed myself to the speed increase and decided to install the 7200rpm drive.
The hardest decision was deciding on the right 7200rpm, I had two under consideration, a Seagte Momentus 7200.3 drive and the Western Digital Scorpio 7200rpm drive. Price-wise there was little to separate them, the Seagate was marginally more expensive cost-wise but the amount was negligible.
I then started comparing the drives specifications, first I examined the benchmarks on Toms Hardware and the reviews for the two drives. Here it seems that the Seagate is slightly faster than the Scorpio, so at the beginning I was leaning more towards the Seagate but again the difference between the two was only slight.
Reading further though I came to power consumption and here although the Seagate idles at a lower power rate than the Scorpio, during usage, the Scorpio has the lowest rating, so essentially, while watching movies or using the computer, the battery should take less of a hit, which really appealed to me.
I went through the rest of the specifications and the difference between the two on paper is really quite small, in fact both companies even offer a 5 year warranty, which also would have been a deciding factor.
Having gone through the articles at Toms Hardware, I went to each of the manufacturers sites and examined the specs for the drives there, the warranties and so on but did not see anything to change my decision. One thing that you should be aware of though, at least with the Western Digital drive is that it comes in two versions, one with a motion sensor built in, one without. According to some reports I read on the internet, the motion sensor in the drive can conflict with the motion sensor in the Macbook Pro, though I dont think that anyone has determined this one hundred percent for sure yet. Either way, it makes sense logically that if you can avoid areas of conflict its a good idea so I chose the drive without the motion sensor - these drives have BEKT in the serial number so you can tell.
Now all that was left was to perform the installation itself.
The way that I did the installation was;
I plugged the drive into my Macbook Pro externally at the beginning, using one of those external IDE/Sata to USB cables. (e.g. Something like this)
Upon connecting the drive, Disk Utility reported that it needed to be initialised, so I created a single partition on there and made sure to give it a different name to my current drive so that I could tell them apart. You should also click on the options button towards the bottom and select GUI as the partition type, this ensures that Intel Macbooks can boot from it, otherwise it wont work.
Partitioning was a matter of a few seconds, once that was done it was time to start the cloning.
For the cloning part, I used SuperDuper, although Carboncopycloner is also a good alternative. I set Superduper to copy my current internal drive’s Mac partition to the external (new) drive, this is why its a good idea to give them different names, so that you dont get mixed up here and left it to do its thing overnight.
The copy/clone took approximately 4 hours to make, copying at roughly 15mbps.
I also have a Windows partition that I made via Bootcamp but its easier to set this up later and besides Im not aware that SuperDuper is able to clone the whole disk with the Windows partition as well.
Once the clone was done, I booted from it to make sure that all was well and just generally checked that everything was ok, luckily for me it was, so I then shut everything down and prepared to open up the computer.
I followed the guide available at iFixit, which has detailed guides for disassembling most Mac equipment but Im familiar with the steps having done this a couple of times already in the past, as described here. So I wont go into too much detail, just check out my earlier post and the iFixit guide but it is quite easy if youre careful and keep track of the screws. All told it took me probably around 30-45 minutes.
I then put my original HDD into an external USB enclosure, for future use and protection.
Once I had got everything put back together, I powered on the computer, crossed my fingers and hoped
For around 30 seconds, the screen
stayed just pure white, no Apple logo or anything but then just
when I was starting to worry that I may not have reseated the
cables properly or something, the Apple logo appeared and the
computer booted normally.
Once I had logged in, Little Snitch informed me that there had been a change to my system and asked if I was happy with it, so I answered in the affirmative, otherwise, so far I have not seen any other problems or issues. The only minor thing I noticed is that I had a custom icon for my main HDD on the desktop which had been reset to the default, this is easily remedied though.
All you need to do is reconnect your original disk to the computer, again via an IDE/Sata cable as I used earlier or via an enclosure (this is what I did now).
Once the drive appears on the desktop, do a Get Info on it and then from the properties pane, click once on its icon and do a copy (Apple/CMD +C), then do a get info on the new drive and in the properties click on its icon and paste (Apple/CMD +V), this should then restore the icon.
With the Mac seeming to be ok (testing will be ongoing for a few hours at least), I ran Bootcamp and used it to create a Windows partition the same size as I originally had. If you have your external drive mounted, you can check this in Disk Utility by comparing the sizes. Its probably better though if you make a note of the size in Disk Utility at the start and then set this in Bootcamp when you are asked for the partition size.
Once Bootcamp had finished creating the partition, it asked me if I wanted to start the installation or quit and install later. I selected the later option as I already have a working install, so there was no need to reinstall from scratch.
I then started up a program called Winclone, which is used for backing up Windows Bootcamp partitions. In Winclone, I selected the original Windows partition (now on the external drive) as the source and asked it to create an image (Its up to you where you store the image, I stored it on the Mac partition on the external drive, though this meant slightly slower creation/copy speeds). Unfortunately I forgot to time this as a lot was going on at the time but I would say it took around 1.5 to 2 hours.
Once completed, still in Winclone, I now selected the newly created image as the source and my new Bootcamp partition as the destination and started the restore.
The restore took around 2 hours to complete after which it finished successfully. I then booted into Windows, which informed me that the structure of the disk had changed and that it needed to run checkdisk. Checkdisk finished without any problems, after which, Windows rebooted and loaded the desktop. Once at the desktop, Windows recognised the new HDD installed the driver for it and then also rebooted and that was pretty much it.
One final thing that you will need to do though is to go into the system preferences - startup disk and set the new mac partition on the new disk to be the startup disk.
I also just noticed that time machine is also backing up 100gb of data, so it recognised the disk change but it seems that it hasnt started over again, that it is stili continuing the previous backup set.
In fact, I saw that there is currently a 500GB 2.5” drive available and while I was sorely tempted, it only runs at 5400rpm, even so, I was still considering it but what decided it for me was that I realised I dont have another 500GB drive available to clone it to, in order to make backups in the future.
At home I basically have the 1TB TC, which we are using with time machine but I also like to make clones using Superduper or Carboncopycloner, partly so that I have another type of backup to recover from, should the need arise, also so that I dont have all of my backups on the same HDD and finally because in an emergency, I could boot from the clone and work immediately, without having to wait for a restore to finish. Then afterwards I can restore either from the clone or the TC.
So that being said, I committed myself to the speed increase and decided to install the 7200rpm drive.
The hardest decision was deciding on the right 7200rpm, I had two under consideration, a Seagte Momentus 7200.3 drive and the Western Digital Scorpio 7200rpm drive. Price-wise there was little to separate them, the Seagate was marginally more expensive cost-wise but the amount was negligible.
I then started comparing the drives specifications, first I examined the benchmarks on Toms Hardware and the reviews for the two drives. Here it seems that the Seagate is slightly faster than the Scorpio, so at the beginning I was leaning more towards the Seagate but again the difference between the two was only slight.
Reading further though I came to power consumption and here although the Seagate idles at a lower power rate than the Scorpio, during usage, the Scorpio has the lowest rating, so essentially, while watching movies or using the computer, the battery should take less of a hit, which really appealed to me.
I went through the rest of the specifications and the difference between the two on paper is really quite small, in fact both companies even offer a 5 year warranty, which also would have been a deciding factor.
Having gone through the articles at Toms Hardware, I went to each of the manufacturers sites and examined the specs for the drives there, the warranties and so on but did not see anything to change my decision. One thing that you should be aware of though, at least with the Western Digital drive is that it comes in two versions, one with a motion sensor built in, one without. According to some reports I read on the internet, the motion sensor in the drive can conflict with the motion sensor in the Macbook Pro, though I dont think that anyone has determined this one hundred percent for sure yet. Either way, it makes sense logically that if you can avoid areas of conflict its a good idea so I chose the drive without the motion sensor - these drives have BEKT in the serial number so you can tell.
Now all that was left was to perform the installation itself.
The way that I did the installation was;
Phase 1 - Drive preparation and Cloning
I plugged the drive into my Macbook Pro externally at the beginning, using one of those external IDE/Sata to USB cables. (e.g. Something like this)
Upon connecting the drive, Disk Utility reported that it needed to be initialised, so I created a single partition on there and made sure to give it a different name to my current drive so that I could tell them apart. You should also click on the options button towards the bottom and select GUI as the partition type, this ensures that Intel Macbooks can boot from it, otherwise it wont work.
Partitioning was a matter of a few seconds, once that was done it was time to start the cloning.
For the cloning part, I used SuperDuper, although Carboncopycloner is also a good alternative. I set Superduper to copy my current internal drive’s Mac partition to the external (new) drive, this is why its a good idea to give them different names, so that you dont get mixed up here and left it to do its thing overnight.
The copy/clone took approximately 4 hours to make, copying at roughly 15mbps.
I also have a Windows partition that I made via Bootcamp but its easier to set this up later and besides Im not aware that SuperDuper is able to clone the whole disk with the Windows partition as well.
Once the clone was done, I booted from it to make sure that all was well and just generally checked that everything was ok, luckily for me it was, so I then shut everything down and prepared to open up the computer.
Phase 2 - Physical Installation
I followed the guide available at iFixit, which has detailed guides for disassembling most Mac equipment but Im familiar with the steps having done this a couple of times already in the past, as described here. So I wont go into too much detail, just check out my earlier post and the iFixit guide but it is quite easy if youre careful and keep track of the screws. All told it took me probably around 30-45 minutes.
I then put my original HDD into an external USB enclosure, for future use and protection.
Phase 3 - The Big Test
Once I had got everything put back together, I powered on the computer, crossed my fingers and hoped
For around 30 seconds, the screen
stayed just pure white, no Apple logo or anything but then just
when I was starting to worry that I may not have reseated the
cables properly or something, the Apple logo appeared and the
computer booted normally.Once I had logged in, Little Snitch informed me that there had been a change to my system and asked if I was happy with it, so I answered in the affirmative, otherwise, so far I have not seen any other problems or issues. The only minor thing I noticed is that I had a custom icon for my main HDD on the desktop which had been reset to the default, this is easily remedied though.
All you need to do is reconnect your original disk to the computer, again via an IDE/Sata cable as I used earlier or via an enclosure (this is what I did now).
Once the drive appears on the desktop, do a Get Info on it and then from the properties pane, click once on its icon and do a copy (Apple/CMD +C), then do a get info on the new drive and in the properties click on its icon and paste (Apple/CMD +V), this should then restore the icon.
Phase 4 - Restoring Windows
With the Mac seeming to be ok (testing will be ongoing for a few hours at least), I ran Bootcamp and used it to create a Windows partition the same size as I originally had. If you have your external drive mounted, you can check this in Disk Utility by comparing the sizes. Its probably better though if you make a note of the size in Disk Utility at the start and then set this in Bootcamp when you are asked for the partition size.
Once Bootcamp had finished creating the partition, it asked me if I wanted to start the installation or quit and install later. I selected the later option as I already have a working install, so there was no need to reinstall from scratch.
I then started up a program called Winclone, which is used for backing up Windows Bootcamp partitions. In Winclone, I selected the original Windows partition (now on the external drive) as the source and asked it to create an image (Its up to you where you store the image, I stored it on the Mac partition on the external drive, though this meant slightly slower creation/copy speeds). Unfortunately I forgot to time this as a lot was going on at the time but I would say it took around 1.5 to 2 hours.
Once completed, still in Winclone, I now selected the newly created image as the source and my new Bootcamp partition as the destination and started the restore.
The restore took around 2 hours to complete after which it finished successfully. I then booted into Windows, which informed me that the structure of the disk had changed and that it needed to run checkdisk. Checkdisk finished without any problems, after which, Windows rebooted and loaded the desktop. Once at the desktop, Windows recognised the new HDD installed the driver for it and then also rebooted and that was pretty much it.
One final thing that you will need to do though is to go into the system preferences - startup disk and set the new mac partition on the new disk to be the startup disk.
I also just noticed that time machine is also backing up 100gb of data, so it recognised the disk change but it seems that it hasnt started over again, that it is stili continuing the previous backup set.