Replacing the Hard Drive in Your MacBook Pro

Filed under: Apple, How-To

Tagged: hard drive, hitachi, seagate

Today I installed a brand new hard drive in my 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro 15". The drive that was shipped with the computer, a Hitachi 120GB 5400 RPM drive, just wasn't cutting it anymore. I purchased a new Seagate 320GB 7200 RPM SATA drive from NewEgg and replaced it in about 45 minutes.

The tricky part was that according to Apple the hard drive is not a user-replaceable part. Consequently, Apple provides no documentation or support for the operation. Additionally, replacing the hard drive involves doing so pretty non-trivial (and warranty-voiding) surgery on the machine, which involves:

• Removing all Phillips and T6-sized Torx screws on the face of the machine and under the battery
• Removing the top plate (which consists of the entire keyboard / trackpad combination
• Removing a ribbon cable connecting the top plate to the motherboard
• Removing a bracket that holds the hard drive in place
• Taking out the old drive and putting in the new one
• Making sure everything goes back where you found it

Interestingly enough, and despite my best efforts to keep all groups of screws labeled according to where they came from, I still ended up incorrectly placing two Torx screws into the RAM cover. This little blunder totally bent my keyboard and came close to popping it out of place entirely. I guess there's a reason they say measure twice but cut once.

This was easily solved by using a spudger to push the loose tabs back into the frame and slightly bending the metal base back into place. Crisis averted.

Now that the new drive is in, everything is much speedier than before. Apps launch faster and the overall responsiveness of OS X is quicker. It's true that this is a fresh install of OS X, though I still feel like things are much better when compared to the last time I did a fresh install on the old drive.

The only noticeable effect from the surgery is that my trackpad no longer seems to register a two-finger tap. Strangely, two-finger scroll works just fine (in both vertical and horizontal directions), as does a regular one-finger tap. So the trackpad is clearly still able to register when two fingers are used as well as the tap motion itself, but for some reason cannot recognize the combination of the two. Everything else is working great.

We captured the surgery on video, so as soon as we can get it edited I will post that here.

Update: The two-finger tap problem is fixed. Turns out all I needed to do was uncheck and recheck "Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click" in System Preferences.