0.5 TB Disk Upgrade for MacBook Pro 17"

I just upgraded the disk drive on my early 2008 MacBook Pro today to 0.5 TB 7200 rpm drive. Oh I remember my first disk drive was a 20 MB winchester on a DEC LSI-11/23. I also remember carrying around DEC RL-05 disks. I was running out of disk space on my MacBook Pro which had a 200 GB 7200 rpm Hitachi TravelStar drive. There was not enough space for things like large VMware Fusion virtual machines, terrain maps for Silent Wings, video clips, etc. A 5,400 rpm drive is a non-starter for performance reasons, so after some looking around the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420ASG  looked like the only drive to go with. The -G in the part number means G protection, but Apple has it’s own protection as well in the Mac Book Pro. And it feels good that Apple is shipping the Momentus 7200.4 in the latest MacBooks. I brought mine at Buy.com.

I was thinking of buying an external disk tray to mount the drive in while copying data off the internal drive and but then read the reviews at Maximum CPU and MacInTouch for the Newer Technology Voyager Q hard drive dock and deviced to go that route. I brought mine from MacSales/Other World Computing. At around $95 it is more expensive than a simple external tray, but it is also much more useful in jockying disk drives between systems. I connected it to my MacBook Pro over Firewire 800 and it worked great, including booting off the Firewire 800 to test the disk worked fine.

A small Phillips screwdriver and Torx T6 driver was all else I needed. I found the video below that shows how to do the physical drive replacement. I’ve had my MacBook Pro apart before so no mystery there but this is a great video.

The whole backup of the 200 GB disk using Carbon Copy Cloner took about two and a half hours over Firewire 800 to the Voyager Q. Physically swapping the disk took about 15 minutes. Piece of cake.