Replacing a solid state drive on a laptop
 

I have a MacBook Pro that I bought in 2011. I'm running out of space on it. It has a 516 GB hard drive, but that's turning into not enough.

It's a fantastic machine otherwise. Incredibly reliable, and I've taken it all over the world without incident. It's fast, versatile, and light weight.

A new MacBook Pro is something like $2,500 (with all the memory and highest speeds.) That's a pretty steep expenditure. It it was $1,200 to $1,500 I would be much more willing to replace it.

For those with more technical knowledge, it's a 2.8 Ghz Intel Core i7 with 8 GB, 1333 MHz.

How hard is it to replace the drive?

I have the Time Capsule backup system, but I'd be really fearful about doing this myself. And I'm a bit dubious of "Mac Specialist" store front establishments.

Any thoughts?

It might not be cost-effective to put an SSD in it. 750 GB SSDs are currently selling for $425+ and, if you have an older MacBook Pro, its internal interface might not be fast enough to take advantage of an SSD. Here's an informative post in the Apple Support Communities: Upgrading Your MacBook Pro with a Solid State Drive

If your Mac is fast enough to use a SSD, definitely get one...... but if it isn't fast enough for a SSD and you are happy with the laptop and just want more space, 1TB hard drives are only about $100.

A store front tech would probably put the new drive in a hard drive dock (example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817153066), connect that to your laptop, and copy your files that way. Once everything was copied, they'd pull the old drive out of the laptop and insert the new one in its place.

Thank you, RatherBeOnATrain!

Do you really need all 512GB of information on the HD?

Can you archive some items that you're not using on a regular basis, or even move into longer term storage some larger files?

A 1+ TB external HD might be the best solution at <$100.

Any laptop built after 2009 is practically guaranteed to be at least SATA II, supporting 3Gb/sec transfer rates. The OP will see a dramatic improvement in performance even though it may not be SATA III (6Gb/sec). Transfer rate isn't the only criteria either; seek times/latency in "spinny" drives are vastly greater.

My Lenovo T420, released in February 2012, is SATA III; my T400 (still hanging around as an emergency spare) is SATA II and was released in late 2008. I'm quite sure Apple wouldn't have been lagging too far behind.

SSD's are dropping very quickly. 1Tb is only $450 from most vendors.

Irrelevant. The biggest advantage of a SSD is not a matter of the speed of the interface but the lack of latency. A SSD that is throttled to older SATA speeds will still be lightning fast compared to a hard drive.

A while back I had a port failure on my main machine, the temporary fix was to move my SSD to a SATA II port. I didn't even notice the difference.

I believe some older Macs aren't compatible with SSDs because of a bus speed issue. When I was first told about it by an IT consultant/desktop support friend, I didn't believe it either.

MOD EDIT

Mats, head to http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl...drive-ssd.html it helps with identifying your Mac and links to the relevant Apple guides on how to replace your disk It also states the earlier models 1.5gbps limit was removed since with a software update but people above are correct in that limit is irrelevant.

My guess is you have a MacbookPro8,1 http://www.everymac.com/ultimate-mac...=MacBookPro8,1 or perhaps a 8,2 not much of a difference. You will be able to, without much effort (remember, even Apple has a guide to do this), replace the HDD with an SSD. Here's https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook...placement/5119 the ifixit guide. Note the hardest step there is disconnecting the battery which might not be necessary (it's good to protect the system from mishaps of course but perhaps ifixit wants to sell you a spludger -- who knows ) but for example the instructables http://www.instructables.com/id/Inst...Book/?ALLSTEPS guide skips it. I am taking no responsibility of what you are doing with your MacBook of course :)

Also you can put the existing or a new HDD (Samsung Spinpoint M9T comes in 1.5TB and 2TB sizes, for example) into the optical bay as well if you so want. This requires a simple, cheap adapter (even OWC, the king of fleecing Mac people only asks $35 for this adapter, on eBay you can find many for $6 shipped).

I replaced the HDD on my 2008 MBP with a Samsung 840 Pro 240g SDD. I also maxed out the ram and put on a fresh install of Mavericks. Yes, that computer is only SATA I and cannot take advantage of the drive speeds, but let me just say it is, with that mod, like a new computer and I plan on getting many more years of us out of it. The added bonus is you can then use your old HDD as your time machine drive.

The major noticeable difference is in the drive access speed. Startup from cold is under 20 seconds. Programs open almost instantly. Even the processor hungry ones. I can't recommend making the switch enough.

N.B. - it's easy enough to do yourself and I comfortably did it by watching a youtube video once or twice., but be careful with the ribbon cable. I broke the connector at the motherboard coming out. It was a cheap fix, but put my box out of commission for a week while it was shipped.

Folks, we have a history of allowing all kinds of tech post here. If you think it is off-topic, report to us, don't go posting why you don't think it belongs here.

a 2011 machine will benefit from a nice SSD drive. Its up to you whether you want to milk a few more years or just get a new laptop.

Ifixit.com has a very nice step by step example. This link shows you how to do it for a MacBook Pro 15" late 2011 model: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook...placement/7513

Thank you all. I'm not totally sure what I'll do at this juncture. I also had a chat with a particularly thoughtful "genius" at the Apple Store. We had a good chat about the rise of converting DVDs and CDs to our hard drives, and how this has resulted in a lack of space for many users. In other words, he normalized the problem, and also made some space-saving suggestions.

There seem to be multiple sensible solutions. And a DIY swap doesn't look particularly terrifying. Likewise, the Apple Store recommended two particular third party stores in town. I'm sure I can make this work one way or another.

The DIY swaps for Macbook hard drives is very easy. I've done many, and the longest part is waiting for the hard drive to be cloned.

Use CarbonCopyCloner (freeware) and a 2.5" enclosure to copy to the new SSD.

Have a set of precision screwdriver and torx bit handy as per iFixIt guide.

Takes about 10 minutes (or less!) to do the swap carefully.

Boot! That's it you're done. :D

That's what I was thinking.

I have an "old" Acer Aspire AS1410 netbook from 2009. I upgraded the 5400RPM HD to a Crucial SSD and doubled the RAM.

It made a huge difference in speed and usability. Well worth the money.

While I've never done a Mac I've done various PCs, desktop and laptop. The clone is always the slowest part of it.

Ditto. We replaced the HD in our old Asus EeePC netbook with an SSD and it boots in a third to half the time; haven't actually measured it, but it went from about 45 seconds to 15-20 seconds.

I have the very same laptop and did the same but with an Intel SSD! The nice part was that Intel also provided the Data Migration software.

I know I'm a little late on this topic... But I thought I could give some input.

OP, I have a Mid-2012 MBP. I took the 500GB HDD and put it in the SuperDrive slot via an adapter. I threw a 120GB SSD into the HDD's spot. Works perfectly fine for my uses.

I do have full Microsoft Office 2007, iWork suite, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5, Aperture, Steam + Games and 3-4 full languages (Stage 1-4) of Rosetta Stone all on my SSD and I see no issues there.

Only issue is that I'm needing more processing power... :p

I want to install a SSD drive in my Toshiba Tecra laptop. Since it has a relatively fresh reinstall of Windows and about four dozen programs, I'd like to clone the new drive instead of reinstalling everything. (Wish I'd decided an SSD was worth the money before all that reinstalling!)

I figured out I need to download a program like EaseUS (is there something better that's also free?) and buy a drive enclosure and cable to connect the drives. Any recommendations for a cheap enclosure? Do they typically come with a cable?

If you buy a Crucial SSD you'll get a code to download Acronis software - extremely simple to clone your old drive to the new one and adjust the size of partitions to reflect the new, larger drive. I just did this for a friend a month ago - redonkulously easy.

A Crucial 1TB SSD is going for about $325 these days. We got the MX200 model and an Anker drive enclosure (where the old drive now resides as backup) on Amazon. The enclosures do come with a cable.

I recommend getting a drive dock. I have a StarTech drive duplicator dock so I can duplicate a drive without a host computer, but if you're only going to do this once I recommend getting a cheap USB external drive dock.

I got the more expensive standalone version so I don't have to leave my computer on plus just to have that feature.

I also use it to preclear my drives for my NAS and also for doing Tivo drive work.

I've never seen an enclosure that didn't come with a cable.

Straight over duplication only works if the drives are identical. You need software if you need to change the volume size and you might need it even with matching drives if you have an old format that isn't SSD-aligned. Having it out of alignment will not stop keep it from working but it will cost you performance.

Thanks, everybody.

Loren, I'm getting an SSD that is larger than the current HDD. So it sounds like I need to skip cloning since the drive sizes aren't the same.

Does installing Windows on a different drive present a problem with Microsoft?

Acronis cloning software includes the expanding of partitions so that the new, larger drive is completely allocated.

No, Windows doesn't usually barf at you in this case, it doesn't know that the HDD has changed.

If you go swap out the mobo, and other things, then perhaps.

Cloning software can handle the different drive sizes. I was saying a dock capable of drive duplication couldn't handle this case.

I disagree--expect to have to reactivate Windows.

I've done many many many clones, and have never been asked.

Anyways, top tip to people who have to re-activate Windows, if you use the first option (connect to the internet), and it barfs, use the phone activation method, it's a pain, but eventually it'll ask you how many machines you have Windows installed on, put 0, or whatever the truthful number is, and it'll then give you the code to activate it.

Little loophole I've learned over the years.

Same goes with Office

Same here - recently upgraded my SSD in size with no need to revalidate.

When I cloned my friend's platter HD to a new 1 TB SSD, after doing the clone procedure in Acronis, I simply swapped out the drives and restarted the laptop. It burst into action (honestly, that's how fast SSDs are) and there was not, and never has been, any request from Microsoft to activate.

Windows does know that the hard drive has changed. But the policies that require reactivation are not so strict that swapping a drive alone will trigger it. Microsoft uses this information along with many more bits of data on the other hardware in the machine to determine whether the computer is substantially similar. If not, reactivation is required.

Yes, while this is updated in WMI, the point was that it doesn't require reactivation.

The last couple of times I've swapped out a drive I got the "This is not genuine" warning--reactivate and it was happy.

It's been a long time since I've had to do a phone activation. XP used to puke on me so often that I kept having to reinstall and kept having to go through the phone activation. Since XP SP2 I've only had Windows puke badly enough to need a reinstall once. (Most of these, including the latest, was something that freaks out in the device manager and it won't accept any new mass storage devices. This is nasty because it applies to USB devices--sooner or later it would strike even on known devices such as my Kindle.)

Best free alternative: http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
(Not exactly user-friendly, though!)

Second-best free alternative: Windows disk image backup. (requires a third drive since it's "make backup from original to backup drive, restore backup to new drive from backup drive") MUCH, MUCH more user-friendly.

I've seen a very few very cheap ones that didn't, but it's extremely unusual (and if you're getting the typical $15-$20 ones rather than the $5-$8 "direct from Asia" ones, I've never seen them not come with a cable, either.)

SSD alignment is only an issue on older OSes; new installs of 8/8.1/10 will use 1MB alignment even on disks. I think that's true for Windows 7 as well.

Also, Windows (since Vista) can expand a volume in-place in many cases*, in which case the volume just has to be equal size* or bigger

(* the main limit is that if you're still running the manufacturer image, you usually can't move the recovery volume out of the way.
** note that there is some variation in drives with the same published capacity, so I would not bet on two "500gb" or "512gb" actually being exact to within a few megabytes/thousands of sectors, but any 512gb drive should be bigger than any 500gb drive.)

Third party cloning software will typically handle this for you; Windows image backup will handle the alignment issues but not the resizing (which may be trivial to fix after cloning, depending on the partition layout on your machine)... Unless you know what "dd" is, this is probably not a big deal.

It may require re-activation, which in the worst case requires an annoying phone call of punching in touch tone numbers. Not a big deal.

Depends on the cloning device; we had ones a couple of jobs ago that would do re-sizing and even change SIDs on Windows 2000/XP. Old enough that the annoying embedded OS they ran had to have a serial cable to change settings...

Few years ago I swapped out a platter hard drive for a ssd from crucial. I won't say that it didn't last long, but the life expectancy was much shorter than anticipated. It was easy enough, and they sell a cloning kit for like $15 that copies everything, and there was no windows activation needed. (Oddly, I could never get web root to work on it again.)

A cheap alternative would be just getting a low profile usb flash drive Amazon has them on sale for a reasonable amount for the size.

The longevity of SSDs has improved dramatically over the last few years, and now approaches (and in the "rough use" arena, definitely exceeds) that of regular "spinny" hard drives. I've been using SSDs exclusively in my laptops for the last 2 years and don't have any intention of going back.

USB flash drives won't offer the same performance as SSDs. Even USB3 isn't as fast as SATA3, and you'll find that the controllers built into flash drives aren't generally as intelligent at I/O operations as SSDs. For example, the flash drive you referenced supports a read speed of 120MB/s while a SATA3 SSD supports up to 550MB/s. That's a very noticeable difference on today's hardware.

I've been using SSDs exclusively [eta: in laptops] for something like 7 years. Longevity has NEVER been an issue for normal use; I've never seen an SSD run out of write lifetime except in truly abusive server workloads -- even in servers, it takes a lot of work to run out of write lifetime. I've never tried running one in a DVR -- that's probably the worst possible consumer use of one, and one where someone using it very heavily (e.g. a security system constantly writing) might have to worry about write lifetime.

The oldest SSD I have (an 80GB Intel X25-M, G1 without trim) is still working. Not really good for much at that size, but still working.

Every single failed SSD I've ever seen has involved a controller failure in some form. Usually of the catastrophic "bricked" variety.

As for write lifetimes, they've actually gotten worse over time rather than better -- newer grades of consumer flash can do many, many fewer writes per cell given the same write patterns. Better DSP algorithms can extend that a bit, and the FTLs have gotten better at avoiding write amplification, so it's not entirely down-hill, but it's all entirely irrelevant: to completely wear out even a "short lived" drive, you'd need to rewrite the whole drive 3x a day, every day, for a year.

Unless you're moving multi-gigabyte files around, that's really not a noticeable difference; nor will most people notice the difference in speed between running an SSD on 3Gbps SATA vs 6Gbps SATA. the random-access performance makes a much bigger difference; that said, even the fastest dedicated USB disks I've seen (and the Lexar P20 is pretty nice!) are pretty miserable for that.

I've got an old 160GB Intel X25-M in a USB3 enclosure as my knockaround drive, and it would be almost tolerable as a bootable drive in a pinch, but the USB overhead is still kind of a killer. For moving bulk files, the ~150-200MB/sec read and write speed is more than fast enough for anything -- it's faster than the gigabit ethernet I'd otherwise be using.