Since we recently detailed how you can increase the storage space in a MacBook Air with solid state drive replacement modules, some readers have asked how it would be like changing the hard drive in an old MacBook with a disc SSD as fast. We decided to investigate, and it turns out that with a single disk size 2.5 "external enclosures and widely available, the swap is faster, easier and less expensive than a MacBook Air.
Regardless of age, depending on the machine, and in some cases, the location of the BTO options, the number of speed ranges. Yet, even our old MacBook Intel original, as we shall explain later, if in fact represents the worst case, only went very useful in the production of a few hours. Here we tell you how to update itself.
Improve
This how-to, we used the original 2.0 GHz Core Duo (yup, 32-bit), a white MacBook. He recently had some great work to expand the repair because of faulty batteries. Apple Care to replace almost everything, including keyboard, bottom cover, battery and optical drive. In fact, the only original unit is an LCD, the LCD and the motherboard slot.
Unlike the iBook before it, has designed the Apple MacBook to upgrade the hard drive (and RAM) is relatively simple, if this machine has seen some improvements in recent years. That includes maxing out the RAM installed 2 GB (512) and gradually increase the capacity of the hard drive. He came originally equipped with a disk of 80 GB 5400rpm, but recently had a monster 500GB 7200RPM Seagate stuffed inside.
The MacBook can not run León, with its old practice of 32-bit processor, but you can run the latest version of Snow Leopard. Also Microsoft Office 2011, iLife '11 and Adobe Creative Suite CS3 installed. This is not the fastest Mac on the planet, but for many tasks, it is a useful machine. But when you do more than read email or browse a few web pages reduces performance to a crawl once the limit of 2 GB of RAM and Mac OS X arrives at the starting virtual memory paging and from the hard disk.
Since everyone else is already at maximum, we wanted to upgrade the SSD to squeeze life a little 'more than this laptop. If you have an old computer, which is already the largest of RAM, but still use the hard drive, and not market a new computer soon, you can give a push to update the SSD.
The last thing to keep in mind is that the SSD is still considerably more expensive than traditional storage capacity of the hard disk. Our old MacBook was a massive 500 GB capacity, but the unit is only about 130 GB of information. We ordered 240 GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 3G units to install and test the
The installation process for the player himself is simple: remove the laptop battery and a small support for accessing internal drive bay, remove the current hard drive, change the OWC SSD, and put the hook and back battery. Depending on your comfort level, you should be able to do this in 10-15 minutes.
Data switching to the new SSD was pretty quick and painless. We used an external enclosure to clone boot drive to a new MacBook SSD before installing it. Alternatively, you can install a new Mac OS X, and restore a Time Machine backup, or pull information on the startup disk using Migration Assistant. If you are worried that the boot capacity has come to bridge the digital cruft, you can also install the software manually and copy all important data from the old boot volume, if necessary.
We believe in a "standard clone" method is a good compromise between a fast and safe.
