- Joined
- Mar 26, 2011
- Messages
- 39
- Motherboard
- Powermac G5 Case , Sabertooth X79 2011
- CPU
- i7 3930
- Graphics
- Geforce GTX 670
- Mac
- Classic Mac
- Mobile Phone
I know this will be old hat to a lot of you, but I thought I'd share my experience of fitting a second internal hard drive to my 2008 Macbook Pro.
It started when I decided to upgrade the primary hard drive (1TB Sata) to a 64GB SSD to spice up performance -which it did. Rather than let the relatively new 1TB 2.5 inch drive go to waste, I decided to remove the laptop's optical drive and install the hard drive in it's place.
The project itself took around 2 hours to complete, using the detailed and easy to follow instructions on the ifixit site http://www.ifixit.com/Device/Mac
Apart from the SSD drive, my only other purchases was a optical bay hard drive enclosure caddy (£16 from Amazon) and a T6 torx screwdriver
Prior to replacing the hard drive I backed up the OS to an external hard drive using Time Machine, and restored the OS to the SSD (I wish this process in Windows was as slick as MacOS).
Dismantling the laptop was straightforward enough, I'm pleased I sorted the (tiny) screws because they are slightly different sizes, which would have been a nightmare on re-assembly. The hard drive caddy fit snugly into the Optical bay after the optical drive was removed.
The only hiccup in the process was that initially I bought the wrong hard drive enclosure caddy, my particular model Macbook Pro uses an IDE connector from Optical drive to motherboard, later models use a sata type connector. Therefore if you are contemplating doing this, it's worth doing your homework.
After everything put together again, and the OS restored to the SSD, the Macbook recognised the 2nd drive without any problem.
It started when I decided to upgrade the primary hard drive (1TB Sata) to a 64GB SSD to spice up performance -which it did. Rather than let the relatively new 1TB 2.5 inch drive go to waste, I decided to remove the laptop's optical drive and install the hard drive in it's place.
The project itself took around 2 hours to complete, using the detailed and easy to follow instructions on the ifixit site http://www.ifixit.com/Device/Mac
Apart from the SSD drive, my only other purchases was a optical bay hard drive enclosure caddy (£16 from Amazon) and a T6 torx screwdriver
Prior to replacing the hard drive I backed up the OS to an external hard drive using Time Machine, and restored the OS to the SSD (I wish this process in Windows was as slick as MacOS).
Dismantling the laptop was straightforward enough, I'm pleased I sorted the (tiny) screws because they are slightly different sizes, which would have been a nightmare on re-assembly. The hard drive caddy fit snugly into the Optical bay after the optical drive was removed.
The only hiccup in the process was that initially I bought the wrong hard drive enclosure caddy, my particular model Macbook Pro uses an IDE connector from Optical drive to motherboard, later models use a sata type connector. Therefore if you are contemplating doing this, it's worth doing your homework.
After everything put together again, and the OS restored to the SSD, the Macbook recognised the 2nd drive without any problem.
