MacBook Hard Drive Upgrade

I use my apple notebook more than any other piece of gear I own. More than my phone. Lookout.

That being said, I feel OK about owning a nice laptop, because it's cost is justified in it's usage. I would rather drive a lesser vehicle and have a nicer laptop, because the car is only used for 15mins a day or so.

Now for a strangely contradictory statement, I only own a basic Apple MacBook laptop, an old one, too. I don't have a MacBook Pro, and I don't have the new model. I'm trying to hold on to my little black MacBook for as long as possible. I like it's size, I like it's price. For the last six months I thought I'd have to hold on to it forever, because Apple removed firewire from the MacBook lineup. Now they've got a 13in MacBook Pro with a 7hr battery and firewire 800. That's looking like my next computer, when the time is right.

But for now, I'm stuffing every kind of upgrade I can inside this little plastic casing. First I upgraded (doubled) the memory. This weekend, I did the hard drive.

I thought 250GB would hold me over until the rapture, but apparently not. I've got an average 30+ gigabytes of music, not too many TV shows, barely any movies, and a few measly gigs of documents. The space on my machine goes to THE PHOTOS. Oh my goodness I've got over 100GB of photos, and those are just the ones I keep close by. I've got quite a few stored up on an external drive.

So, the time has come for a hard drive upgrade. Like the memory, I waited until I could double the firepower. Three months ago it would have cost me $175 for a 320GB HDD. That's no good. This week I spent $96 on a 500GB. Double my 250GB.

I decided on a Hitachi, the same brand that was already in my MacBook originally. In fact, this is the exact same drive, the same specs, the same everything, only in a 500GB model. Perfect.

I won't ramble on too long, because I'm sure this is quite boring if you don't have the need to do this, but let's just say it was Super Duper Easy. No joke. I bought two items:

1. 500GB drive
2. External Enclosure

I put the NEW drive in the enclosure and used a program called "Super Duper" to make an exact copy of my OLD drive onto the NEW one. It ran overnight and was done this morning. So, not too long of a process really.

Then I pulled my OLD drive out, (way too easy, btw) put the NEW one in, and turned my computer back on. Now I have space. Weird. It just worked. FANTASTIC.

So, about $125, an overnight process and about 10mins worth of work doubled the size of my computer's storage space. I would highly recommend this if you need the space. You don't have to run out and buy a new computer for more space. We can swap your drives out for DIRT CHEAP.

Anyway, another nerdy post, sorry. This blog is becoming NERD CENTRAL this summer. Hopefully when school starts back up I'll have something slightly interesting to talk about, but until then, LET THE NERD KNOWLEDGE FLOW!