SSD upgrade MacBook Pro
September 23, 2013Tutorials
I recently updated my hard drive on my MacBook Pro to an SSD drive. I used the following tutorials to do the upgrade, which was pretty stratightforward:
The second video is particularly interesting. You can purchase a cradle for another hard drive. This can be used either for you existing hard drive, or a second identical SSD that you can then put in RAID configuration.
Parts
I picked up the pieces from Amazon UK here: Optical Bay Caddy Samsung 840 Series SSD
and then some precision screwdriver sets:
Mac OSX Mountain Lion Re-Installation
With the double effects of a clean installation of Mac OSX and the new drives the performance increases have been really worth it. My Mac now boots up in appox 12 seconds and application loads are really responsive.
Final note, to create a Mac OSX Mountain Lion installation disk, I followed the following tutorial and used an 8GB USB thumb drive I had lying around. Complete reinstallation took a little while (and data recovery from my Time Machine drive). I’d say 30 minutes for OSX installation and then 2 hours for data recovery from the backup (approx 130Gb). http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/apple-in-the-enterprise/how-to-create-a-bootable-usb-to-install-os-x/
Memory Upgrade Note
Just a note, I have the mid 2010 MacBook Pro which has a maximum RAM loadout of 8GB. The later MacBook Pros can take 16Gb of RAM. If this option was available to me I would have taken it. Especially if you’re working with Virtual Machines, it is really handy.