[Unblowupable5]

I'm in the market for the white MacBook, but have a few questions about upgrading it on my own. I want to increase my RAM to 4GB, which I can do for a lot cheaper than what Apple charges (2GB is standard, Apple charges $90 to upgrade to 4GB). I'd also like to increase my hard drive to at least 320GB (160GB is standard, Apple again charges $90 to upgrade to 320GB). How easy is it to upgrade these on my own? I'm an electrical engineer, so I'm quite comfortable replacing these components on my own as long as it's not too difficult. I've made a few upgrades to my iMac G5, but had heard that the MacBooks were a PITA to work on. Any advice from those that are familiar with this system? Thanks in advance.

[Simon]

MacBooks have always made updating RAM and HDDs especially easy. It's much easier than it used to be iBooks or pre-UB MBPs for that matter.

Both procedures are very simple. Any regular user can do it so as an EE you should have absolutely no trouble. Instructions are given in the MacBook user guide (see p.31-40). You will find instructions for hard drive replacement here and here.

Here's a 4 GB kit for $39.

Here's an excellent 500GB/5400rpm disk for $90 shipped. This one's 320GB/7200rpm for $70 shipped. My favorite is this 500GB/7200rpm disk - the fastest and largest notebook HDD you can find. It costs $140 though.

[Unblowupable5]

Excellent. Looks pretty simple. I'm interested in the 500GB/7200rpm HD. Out of curiosity, are you using this disk yourself? I'm reading the reviews, and it seems that quite a few people are complaining about drive failures and vibration/clicking. Then again, most people don't bother writing a review unless there's an issue, so probably nothing to be too concerned with...

[Simon]

There were indeed some issues with early shipments of the 7200.4.

I have so far bought two and use both of them daily. Couldn't be happier with a notebook HDD. Of course my next notebook disk will probably be an SSD but in terms of notebook hard disks it doesn't get any better than this.

[Unblowupable5]

Good to hear. Thanks!

[Pompeyboy]

Hi There I have just upgraded my White Macbook with a 320gb HD and also up graded the ram to 4gb both fairly easy and I have pretty much no experience of doing anything like this, only trouble I had was with a slight problem getting the HD formatted, but with a bit of advice from this site managed to get it done.
good luck.

[Simon]

That's right. Most HDDs need to be formatted first.

After installing a new disk boot from the installer DVD (or a clone of your old disk) and run DiskUtility (it's in the Utilities menu if you use the installer DVD). Format the disk as HFS+ Extended/Journaled and you're good to go.

The alternative is cloning to the new disk beforehand. Then you can boot from the new disk right after installing it. Either way works fine.