

- #HARD DRIVE APPLE MACBOOK PRO INSTALL#
- #HARD DRIVE APPLE MACBOOK PRO ARCHIVE#
- #HARD DRIVE APPLE MACBOOK PRO UPGRADE#
- #HARD DRIVE APPLE MACBOOK PRO PRO#
Speck SeeThru and sported a “skin” keyboard cover for both tests this likely increased temperatures slightly, but it should have affected both drives equally.)
#HARD DRIVE APPLE MACBOOK PRO PRO#
(Note that the MacBook Pro in question was encased in a IStat nano, just after the battery test finished-in other words, after the drive had been reading/writing continually, and the laptop had been running off battery power, for over two hours. The new Hitachi drive was also a bit quieter during use than the original drive.įinally, I also measured the MacBook Pro’s temperatures, using the excellent The new drive was noticeably faster, yet used less power than the factory-installed 100GB model, which was itself supposed to be a bit faster than the stock 80GB drive included with most Core Duo MacBook Pros. Battery test times rounded to the nearest minute. I performed this test while booted up normally however, in order to ensure that neither test would be affected by screen brightness or wireless activity, I set Energy Saver to never sleep and never dim the screen, and I disabled AirPort and Bluetooth.įinder test times in minutes:seconds, rounded to the nearest second. To get an idea of how the new drive affected my MacBook Pro’s battery life, I created a Unix shell script that duplicates a large file (745MB, in this case), deletes the duplicate, and then repeats the process the script basically reads from and writes to the disk continually until the battery dies.

I timed this process three times and then averaged the times.
#HARD DRIVE APPLE MACBOOK PRO ARCHIVE#
zip archive containing both the original and the copy (1090 files in all), and then un-archived the resulting archive. Using the Finder, I duplicated that folder, created a. To get a basic idea of each drive’s performance, I started with a folder containing 545 small image files, approximately 100MB in total size. Each test was performed on both the original drive before replacement and the new drive after replacement. Before running any tests on the original drive, I backed it up, reformatted it, and restored it this was to ensure that the drive would be just as un-fragmented as the new drive. Printable guide to upgrading the hard drive on a Core Duo MacBook Pro.Īlthough I didn’t put the new drive through a comprehensive set of benchmarks, I did run some tests to get a rough idea of how it compared to my MacBook Pro’s original drive (a 100GB, 5400rpm Toshiba model installed when I purchased the laptop directly from Apple in April 2006).

And Hitachi doesn’t include computer-specific installation instructions. User-installable part, so you won’t find instructions on Apple’s support site. The actual process of installing the new drive is the most difficult part of the upgrade.
#HARD DRIVE APPLE MACBOOK PRO UPGRADE#
(The 5K160 Upgrade Kit includes backup software for this purpose, but the software is Windows-only.) In my case, cloning my MacBook Pro’s built-in 100GB drive took roughly an hour and a half. Although you can use Disk Utility’s Restore screen to do this, I personally used That task out of the way, you’ll want to make the new drive a clone -a bootable, mirror-image copy-of the old one. The Travelstar drive is initially formatted for Windows computers, so you need to use Disk Utility to format it as a “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” volume. And the enclosure lets you use your old hard drive for backups or other data storage afterwards. I’m a big fan of hard-drive kits that include such an enclosure, as it makes the process of copying your data before the swap much simpler (and faster)-otherwise, you’d need to use another Mac or a separate hard drive to temporarily host your data. The drive connects to your laptop using two USB cables, one for data and one for additional power. Putting the new drive in the enclosure-it doesn’t come pre-installed-is a simple process involving five Phillips screws, four to mount the drive in the enclosure and one to secure the case.
#HARD DRIVE APPLE MACBOOK PRO INSTALL#
Before you install the drive, you’ll need to copy the data from your original hard drive to the new one using the included USB drive enclosure.
