MacBook Pro Hard Drive Replacement
The 120GB hard drive on my 15" MacBook Pro 2.16 Core 2 Duo has been teetering on the edge of full for a while now and I finally decided to go ahead and swap it out with a bigger and faster drive. One of the questions I had going into this was whether the SATA 3.0Gbps drives would work on the 1.5Gbps controller that is built into the motherboard. As it turns out, they work just fine. Here are the steps I took to replace the drive:
- I bought a 320GB Western Digital Scorpio Black from Newegg along with an external enclosure.
- Put the new drive in the enclosure and connected it to the Laptop.
- Formatted and used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my existing hard drive onto the new one. It took a couple of hours to complete.
- Followed the instructions on ifixit.com for replacing the hard drive. It looks intimidating, but was actually really easy. Just don't lose those tiny screws!
That was it. I booted the computer back up when everything was back together and it works like a champ. Everything is as it was before I replaced the drive and the computer is running much faster than it was before.
