Macbook Pro - SSD Upgrade

In this blog a look at how easy it is to upgrade your system drive in an OSX based Macbook Pro.


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As I’ve mentioned a lot, I use my
Macbook Pro for virtualisation an awful lot. It’s an incredibly powerful platform for getting things done quickly. One of the problems with Virtualisation though - and certainly with server based stuff - is that it eats up storage space. I like my demo stuff as fast as possible too, so try and run it off of my SSD.

My Macbook Pro had a
Crucial M4 256Gb unit in it, and it’s proven to be utterly reliable and fast. When I purchased it in 2011, it was about 300GBP - so some GBP1.17 per Gb. Quite a lot really. Anyway, I’ve been watching the prices of SSDs fall recently, so I took the opportunity to buy a Samsung 840 500Gb SSD. This unit cost GBP267, so some 0.54GBP per Gb. That’s a massive decrease isn’t it?

Anyway, I thought I’d run through how to swap the drives - as it’s very simple to do. The process is the same if you were upgrading from a normal hard disk to an SSD based unit too, so I thought it may be useful.

What we are going to do is:

  • Plug the new drive in to a USB enclosure.
  • Mirror/duplicate our OSX drive to the new SSD drive.
  • Install the new SSD into the machine.

To connect the drive to my laptop, I have a USB docking station like this:

DockingStation

They can be had very cheaply from all kinds of places. Anyway, watch this video for a run through of the whole process.
Click here to see the hi-def version on YouTube.


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