Today I embarked upon upgrading the hard drive in my MacBook because it shipped with 80gb (upgraded at the time from 60gb!) and it was becoming fuller and fuller. I had already moved my iTunes and iPhoto libraries over to an external USB drive because of lack of space, so I thought it would be time to upgrade the drive, seeing that MacBooks are supposed to have user serviceable RAM and hard drives.

I decided to go with a 250GB Western Digital 2.5″ SATA drive and I also decided to get an external caddy for the drive (which you’ll see why when I explain how I upgraded). The external caddy I got was a nice Akasa Integral IDE/SATA to USB/eSATA external enclosure. The whole lot set me back a mere £60 which I think is pretty decent considering a stand alone external one is at best £50.

After some Googling I found two links which were of particular interest; one by MacInstruct and one by a blogger Where is Hawkins?. These gave me the ideas and advice needed to go about doing this upgrade.

So, this is how I did it…

First I took the new 250GB hard drive and put that into the external enclosure. This was an easy job, following the instructions that came with the enclosure. Then I hooked this up to my MacBook and found that it was detected – good job.

Now is the bit where you have to make sure things go right… We need the new drive to be bootable so that means setting the partitioning options correctly. I opened Disk Utility and noticed that my new USB drive was being displayed so I clicked on that in the selection box on the left. Then I selected Partition from the tabs and clicked Options… and selected GUID Partition Table - this will make the hard drive bootable by any Intel Mac . Next I selected 1 Partition from the Volume Scheme dropdown and entered a suitable name for it. I left the Format selection at Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Then I used the funky tool SuperDuper to copy the entire contents of my hard drive to the new drive. This was simple. I selected the source as my original hard drive and the target as my new hard drive. Then I selected the Backup – All Files script and started it. This finished in about 2 and a half hours – not bad for 60gb of data I thought.

Now comes the tricky bit… installing the new hard drive into the MacBook…

I started by taking the new drive out of the external enclosure so that it would be ready to go straight in. Next I took the battery out and found myself looking at this:

So I used my Phillips head screwdriver to take out the three screws and away came the L-shaped bracket, exposing the RAM slots and the hard drive with a nice, white pull tab on it – which I pulled and out came the drive!

Now that the drive was out, I had to take off the lovely electrostatic shield from the drive and put this onto the new drive. This required taking out four Torx T8 screws from the original hard drive. After doing this, I was ready to put the new drive, encased with said electrostatic shield, back into my MacBook. This was simple – I just pushed it back in, click, and then the drive was sitting neatly in place. Then I replaced the L-shaped bracket and battery and fired it up.

Needless to say, it worked great and now all my files which I had offloaded onto an external drive are being copied back onto my nice, new, mostly empty hard drive. Although I think that it won’t be long before this one is filled up!!!

Here’s a picture of my original drive with the electrostatic shield on and the new one ready to be dealt with:

Next mission: Time Machine – using the 300GB external drive I now have as spare (It was being used for an overflow, as mentioned).