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cwosigns · Jan 2, 2007, 07:54 AM

Hey Guys,

I have a white MacBook that has the stock 60 GB hard drive...it's filling up pretty rapidly as I've been downloading a lot of music and videos for the gym, as well as taking a lot of pics and videos with my digital camera. I have like 9 GB right now available.

I'd like to have the hard drive upgraded, but not sure where to take it. The Apple Store won't do a HD upgrade (according to the genius). Where would be a good place to take it to have the HD backed up, replaced, and all the data put on the larger drive? What is the biggest SATA laptop drive available?

Thanks.

shifuimam · Jan 2, 2007, 10:50 AM

The easiest way to do it? Do it yourself, and save yourself $100+. Apple has some instructions (PDF) here.

It's a pretty simple procedure, and the odds of you screwing it up are pretty slim, as long as you just go slowly and don't rush the process.

As far as transferring over your old files, the very easiest way is to buy a USB hard drive enclosure for your old hard drive. If you have a second computer, obviously backing up to that is the cheapest route. Otherwise, head over to Fry's or Newegg.com and get yourself a 2.5" SATA laptop drive enclosure. If you buy at a real store, you can always return it when you're done (although external hard drives can really come in handy). SATA costs a little more than IDE, since the technology is newer. Looks like you could get an external enclosure for $30 plus shipping.

As far as drive size goes, it all depends on how much you want to spend. NewEgg has a 200GB Toshiba drive, but it's $250. I would suggest using pricegrabber.com to find the lowest price from places like Fry's, Amazon, ZipZoomFly, NewEgg, Circuit City, etc.

I always recommend Seagate or Toshiba hard drives to people. Seagate's drives have a five-year warranty on them, which is really fantastic if your data is important to you. Toshiba drives I believe still come with a three-year warranty. Maxtor and Western Digital, however, have dropped a lot of their warranties to one-year, which is almost as bad as Apple's factory warranty.

It sounds scary to replace hardware in a computer. Hard drives and RAM, however, are some of the easiest things to replace in any computer (Apple or other brands). $30 for a drive enclosure is a lot cheaper than $100 (and sometimes much more) for someone else to do it for you. It can be a very good learning experience for you, too. Hard drive upgrade services are an absolute ripoff, and the MacBooks make it VERY easy to do it yourself. As long as you're patient and read through the how-tos before starting, you won't lose your data, and you'll save yourself a ton of money.

cwosigns · Jan 2, 2007, 11:21 AM

I have an 80 GB iPod with the ability to use it as an external drive. Can I just click and drag my Macintosh HD icon over to the iPod? Can backing up everything on there really be that simple?

webb3201 · 01:48 PM

Chris,
Replacing the hard drive is very very easy on these machines. Quite possibly the easiest ever on an Apple box. Go to Newegg or a vendor of choice and choose the SATA drive you like. You can get a 120gb 5400 rpm drive or a 100 gb 7200 rpm drive both for around $100.00 us. You can literally install the new one in 5 minutes. Then pop your system restore disks in and install the OS to factory setting.

The next thing is to buy a $10-20.00 external USB 2.0 SATA enclosure (cheap on ebay) and pop in your old drive. Then you can simply mount it that drive on your new installation and drag and drop your music, applications, pictures etc to the new box. You can then reformat the old drive and have a nice portable backup solution.

what you willl need:
new hard drive
screwdriver (phillips head 0 I believe)
coin for battery
OSX restore disk from your purchase
drive enclosure

The whole process will take a complete novice about 5 minutes to complete, in fact you can find a couple of movies on youtube or google that take you step by step through the whole thing.

Once you switched out the drives, insert your restore CD and hold down the "c" key while powering the machine. This will boot into the OSX install program. Partition the disk using disk utility and then install. Easy Peasy

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Mac...dDrive_DIY.pdf

YouTube - Macworld - MacBook Battery Bay (2)

Gossamer · Jan 2, 2007, 02:37 PM

Originally Posted by cwosigns

I have an 80 GB iPod with the ability to use it as an external drive. Can I just click and drag my Macintosh HD icon over to the iPod? Can backing up everything on there really be that simple?

The best way to do it is download Carbon Copy Cloner, then open it up, select your hard drive as the source, your iPod as the destination, and in the preferences, check 'Make Disk Image on Target.'

It will then back up all of your data to a disk image on the iPod. After installing the new hard drive, run the OS X restore discs that came with your computer to reinstall OS X on your computer and upon restart create a dummy admin user. Then connect the iPod and double click on the image that CCC made.
Open up Migration Assistant in your utilities folder, select 'From Another Volume on this Mac,' then choose the image that you mounted. It will find all of your applications and your old username. Import that username.
After everything has imported, log out of the dummy user and log in as your old user. Everything should be as you left it, and you can go into system preferences and delete the dummy user you made, leaving you with just your old user and all of your files just like they used to be.

PBG4 User · Jan 3, 2007, 12:01 PM

Or even better, use Super Duper! and clone your boot drive onto your iPod. Then just use it again after you've installed your new hard drive to copy your OS X install back onto your new HD. No new installs required or anything.

Heck, you could probably use Apple's own Disk Utility to create a backup image, then use the same Disk Utility from the OS X Install DVD and be back to exactly where you were before the HD upgrade, except with more HD space.

Gossamer · Jan 5, 2007, 12:25 AM

Originally Posted by PBG4 User

Or even better, use Super Duper! and clone your boot drive onto your iPod. Then just use it again after you've installed your new hard drive to copy your OS X install back onto your new HD. No new installs required or anything.

Heck, you could probably use Apple's own Disk Utility to create a backup image, then use the same Disk Utility from the OS X Install DVD and be back to exactly where you were before the HD upgrade, except with more HD space.

You could use CCC to just clone the hard disk to the iPod, and that's probably a better way to go as long as you don't mind wiping your iPod.

jasong · Jan 6, 2007, 04:58 PM

And since it is likely that everything on your iPod is on your HD, wiping your iPod for the transfer shouldn't be a problem. However I would still recommend you get the external enclosure for your old drive and do it that way. Then you can use your old drive for backups.

Of course you could also do the iPod route and then sell your old HD to help cover the costs of the new one.

Reel1 · Jan 14, 2007, 03:49 PM

As everyone has said, installing the hard drive is very quick and painless. I recentky changed mine I went from the stock 60 to a Seagate 7200 100 G and will be using my 60 in an external enclosure from Ebay.

The drive works great.

frankthetank966 · Jan 16, 2007, 07:34 AM

Why not go to the Apple Store? How much does it cost to upgrade?

ghporter · Jan 16, 2007, 07:43 AM

Originally Posted by frankthetank966

Why not go to the Apple Store? How much does it cost to upgrade?

A whole lot! Doing the job yourself saves (probably) two or more hours of technician bench time (which would include running diagnostics to ensure the computer is functioning properly to start, changing out the drive, and then more diagnostics to make sure it's still working-this is a standard practice that protects the shop and the technician from "bad" customers that try to get problems fixed without paying for the repair). The going rate for most computer repair places where I live is at least $50 per hour, so do the math. I would not spend $100 or more for something that I could do myself, particularly when Apple provides excellent ILLUSTRATED, step-by-step instructions. The hard drive in a MacBook is really that easy to replace.

LagunaSol · Jan 16, 2007, 09:40 AM

Does anyone have any feedback on specific drives they've used (make/model)? For a laptop application, my personal priority is noise. I want a QUIET drive. I read some user feedback somewhere complaining about the Hitachi Travelstar being an extremely noisy drive. Which MacBook replacement drives have proven themselves to be nice and quiet, based on your experience?

xsphat · Jan 16, 2007, 11:15 AM

Can the MacBook handle drives larger than 120 GB? I have a Core 1 Duo with 2 GB of RAM and a $#%@#$^ 60 GB HDD, by the way.

zyzybalubah1 · Jan 20, 2007, 04:04 PM

Does this void the warranty???

mduell · Jan 20, 2007, 04:38 PM

Originally Posted by xsphat

Can the MacBook handle drives larger than 120 GB? I have a Core 1 Duo with 2 GB of RAM and a $#%@#$^ 60 GB HDD, by the way.

Yes. Feel free to drop a 200GB in.

Originally Posted by zyzybalubah1

Does this void the warranty???

No.

2kkei · Jan 21, 2007, 09:00 PM

I'm planning on getting a HD and put it in a external enclosure for use with with my black MacBook. Was just wondering is theres a specific HD I need to get, and if there are any compatibility issues. I am not too sure with the IDE and Serial ATA types and was wondering what is good for my MacBook. Thanks in advance for any help!

mduell · Jan 21, 2007, 11:01 PM

Any 2.5" SATA (Serial ATA) drive will work.

frdmfghtr · Jan 22, 2007, 05:18 PM

Originally Posted by shifuimam

The easiest way to do it? Do it yourself, and save yourself $100+. Apple has some instructions (PDF) here.

No...it can't POSSIBLY be that easy. I mean, Apple is good at making jumps in technology, but after going through the gauntlet of replacing a hard drive on my 2005 iBook myself, this is too big a leap.

(Yep, being sarcastic)

2kkei · Jan 22, 2007, 07:31 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

Any 2.5" SATA (Serial ATA) drive will work.

Thanks for the reply! So 3.5" drives won't work with the MacBook? Sorry for the questions.

mduell · Jan 22, 2007, 07:46 PM

Originally Posted by 2kkei

Thanks for the reply! So 3.5" drives won't work with the MacBook? Sorry for the questions.

No. 3.5" drives are about four times the volume of 2.5" drives.

ghporter · Jan 22, 2007, 09:06 PM

3.5" drives are "desktop-size" drives. They are slightly smaller than "full size" or "5 1/4"" drives (such as optical drives) in terms of width, and nowhere near small enough to go into ANY laptop. The 2.5" form factor was basically invented for laptops. And you can tell they're for laptops because they're much more expensive than 3.5" drives of similar capacity!

StickClicks · Jan 24, 2007, 09:26 PM

Yeah, I would get an upgrade soon. The rule of thumb is have at least 10% of the HDD's size free for Page ins / outs. You said you have a 60GB. . .

10% of 60GB = 6GB You said you have 9 free? 3 more to go.

Heres a link to one I would consider, it is a bump in RPM's which increases performance.

100GB 7200RPM Seagate

if you just care about size I think 160GB is about the largest one out there.