Once in a blue moon I play with hardware. My home laptop has been dropped more times than I care to admit, and it’s finally started to make bad noises. And be slow. As in, I can run one app at a time slow. So I buckled down and put the comic book money into a new hard drive.
I picked Other World Computing’s Extreme Pro 6G SSD. At 450G.
The content on my laptop has been around since I was in college and bought my first laptop. Literally. I have every paper I’ve written since high school on here, plus music I wrote, plus videos. It’s a lot. My old HD was 300G and I was always low on space. I also make copious backups to Time Machine. The last four times I got a new computer, I did a Mac transfer. This content, hell, this user account, has been around.
You bet your ass I kept it again.
Installing the new HD was easy. Unscrew the back, disconnect the battery, remove the old HD, get the mount screws out, put them and the sticker on the new HD, reconnect everything. screw it’s all back together. Next, though, is the hard part.
I took my old HD and put it in an external drive case. OWC offers a deal where you get the case and a USB connector for cheap, plus all the tools. Perfect. While I have Time Machine, an over air restore would be 24+ hours. A USB restore, provided the HD doesn’t break, would be about 4. Instead of installing the OS and copying things over, I did a restore from Source.
Once I got the old HDD in an enclosure, I attached it to your Mac via USB. Then I rebooted the Mac, which took me to OS X Recovery. From there, I clicked on Open Disk Utility and picked the new drive from the left hand pane. There I chose to Erase it and format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Once done, I clicked on the Restore tab. I picked the external HD (the old one) as my ‘Source’ and the new one as my ‘Destination.’ Illogically, this is a drag and drop step. Sorry about the photo:
When the data transfer was completed, it was as simple as a restart.
If you’re skittish, you can put the new HD in the enclosure and copy it that way, booting off USB when you’re done to test it. I’m a little more daring.
Comments
11 responses to “Replacing a Hard Drive”
Good tips – I ran from an external drive when I bought my first Samsung SSD. It was my first time cracking open the case of a MacBook Pro (previous experience all PCs) and I was nervous about it. It was so easy and the SSD drive improves performance so much it’s hard to put into words. Watching Xcode compile large iOS apps is much less painful with SSD. Anyone running on the old, spinning drives you should swap it out – now! 🙂
Hey, why would you attach your old HDD to *my* Mac ?!?? 😛
@Glenn: Because you want my plugins!
OK you were lucky that the old HD was readable.
OTOH, time machine is not “over the air” unless I’m missing something.
It’s been a while, but I remember restoring someone’s machine that had been stolen from a time machine backup and the process was relatively quick because it too is connected by USB.
@Mike: Time Machine can now restore over air, it’s just slow. Had the disk not been readable (and I knew it was because it was still mostly working…), I was going to get a longer USB cord and plug directly into Time Machine.
Is it possible you are referring to Time Capsule?
@Mike: Possible, I’d have to double check at home (I’m 7000 miles away at the moment). I used to just have a 1TB drive plugged into my router to access that way, though, and it worked much the same.
Yes that would be true.
Anyway, my basic point is a conventional time machine config would give you the same performance as what you did to recover your drive.
@Mike: Ah! Yes, it would.
Had the drive failed, I’d have USB’d the backup. Just bums me out how long the over-air restore would have been 🙁
OK I did some research. Curious if you have a time capsule or an airport with an attached HD?
BTW the latest version of both devices while boasting 802.11 AC which is much faster than 802.11N (also curious which WIFI you have) – these appear to be the only 2 Apple devices w/o USB3.
Anyway I could see in your future if even 802.11 AC isn’t fast enough, using an USB3 to gigabit ethernet cable to connect the devices directly. And then you would just need to swipe a long patch cable from your work 😉 .
http://www.kanex.com/products/item2.aspx?id=4890
@Mike: I have an attached HD and I THINK an older TimeCapsule from like 2010 or 2011.