Many MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pro SSDs come with kits that help you transfer the contents of the old drive to the new one, open your computer, and keep the old SSD around as an external drive if you want it. Today, the lowest-end MacBook Airs and Retina MacBook Pros ship with a 128GB SSD as standard Apple’s 256GB SSD adds $200, versus $500 more for 512GB, or $800 more for a Pro-only 1TB SSD.īut those are Apple prices third-party drives are much more affordable. Following some relatively straightforward guidelines, you can bump an original MacBook Air up to 128GB for $95, or enhance newer MacBooks for $170 (240GB), $300 (480GB), or $550 (1TB). Back in 2008, Air buyers could add a 64GB SSD for a whopping $1,300 premium over the ultra-thin computer’s normal price, and there was no consumer 1TB drive capable of fitting inside a laptop - a desktop 1TB SSD sold for $4,000. The original MacBook Air was designed with solid state memory as an option, not a mandate. Below, I’m going to show those tools to you, as well as the MacBook-ready SSDs that are worth considering… Assuming your MacBook is old enough to be out of warranty - except for a few specific models - you’ll find that pretty much anyone can handle this swap with the right tools.
A new SSD in one of these machines could have two, four, eight, or sixteen times the original storage, plus two to four times faster speeds.Īpple shipped most MacBook Airs and all Retina MacBook Pros with solid state storage, so upgrading these machines for extra capacity and speed is generally as simple as picking a new drive, then using two special screwdrivers during the installation process. Today’s guide looks at the easiest SSD installations of all: the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pro.
#2015 MACBOOK PRO HARD DRIVE REPLACEMENT MAC#
So it got solved in the end, but it wasn’t quite the blissful experience I expected.Over the past two weeks, I’ve written about the (surprisingly easy) process of adding solid state drives (SSDs) to radically speed up older iMacs, and the varied challenge levels of adding SSDs to older Mac Pros, Mac minis, and non-Retina MacBooks. Once that was done I dragged my apps and data from the old drive across to the new drive. So finally I bit the bullet and re-installed Snow Leopard (the most recent media I had), upgraded to Lion, then Mountain Lion through the App Store. I could always replace the old drive, but I was starting to think I might have wasted my money. That would have been fine for a Time Machine backup, since the old drive was not completely full, but for an image restore it’s a big no-no. That would have been fine, except the new hard drive was fractionally smaller than the old one. I connected my old hard drive using a USB cable, booted from the CD and used the Disk Utility to restore the old hard drive to the new SSD. It turns out my Time Machine backups weren’t as complete as I thought. I use Time Machine for backups, so I slapped in the new hard drive, booted from the CD and expected to just restore from Time Machine. The transfer of the data proved a little more tricky than I expected though… The actual hard drive replacement is pretty simple. It arrived yesterday, so during last nights insomnia, I decided to fit the hard drive, rather than stare at the ceiling. Despite this, I was bored the other night and decided to buy an SSD to replace the internal hard drive. I do demos with a couple of Linux VMs running Oracle and it works OK. A few years ago I upgraded from 4G to 8G RAM, so I’m not stranger to taking the back off it.Įven though it’s quite old by computer geek standards, I really don’t have any performance problems. Apart from one brief visit to Apple to replace a noisy fan, I’ve had no worries. I’ve had my 13″ MacBook Pro since the mid 2009 refresh and it’s been really reliable.
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