Advice on hard drive upgrade, please

Greetings all - first-time poster here.

Have 2007 MBP, now down to 11 gigs of space, even with vigilant weeding. Want to upgrade the hard drive. This would be my first-ever experience in swapping out HDDs in a notebook.

Please advise on best, lowest-cost-without-jeopardizing-quality approach. Should I
a) buy the drive direct from Apple online?
b) go to the Apple store?
c) buy someplace else?
1) if so, recommendations on best places, please?
2) any drives/brands to avoid?


Then, should I install myself? I guess I would offload all the personal stuff and laboriously reinstall? I don't have a problem doing this, if it makes the most sense.

There's no Apple genius bar service that does this for you, is there?

Once, in the store, they told me if I successfully got my husband to switch from PC (hasn't happened yet), they would transfer everything he wanted off his PC onto his new Mac. Don't know if that would apply to a mere HDD upgrade.

Thanks very much for any guidance.

newegg.com

Check reviews and buy a reasonably priced 500gb drive. Shouldn't run you more than 75bucks.

I would install it yourself. Guides at ifixit.com. If it looks to hard for you bring it somewhere.

I am for clean installs but if you put it in a external enclose you can just restore the new drive from the old one and your computer will be just like it always has been (but with more space).

If you take it somewhere they should do the data transfer for you.

Apple will charge you extortionate prices.

you can clone your existing drive to the new one, this defeats the need to reinstall, but you need an external caddy for the new drive.

everyone on here has a different preference. some like Seagate (personally, my favourite) others swear by WD. theres very few brands about now, Samsung and Hitachi have just been bought out by the formers.

just make sure the drive is a 2.5" drive. 9mm thick i believe.

OWC, Newegg for the US. also check out amazon.

checkout youtube on how to install for your particular model, theres always a vid.

Both sets of advice dovetail nicely with each, and I really appreciate the help.

I have an external 500G drive that I'm using for photo backup right now; it has plenty of room on it. I'm thinking I can clone the existing hard drive onto that drive, negating the need to buy an external enclosure, and then clone it back onto the new drive?


Again, thanks very much!

I dont think that will work. you need to be able to boot from the disk with the operating system, and then clone to an external, not the other way round.

That would also mean you would do the clone process twice, rather than once, and it takes absolutely ages.

the whole point of cloning is it saves time. you clone onto new drive, take it out of caddy, replace old with new, and your done. it will boot as if nothing has happened.

your way: boot up, clone drive, then shut down, remove drive, boot from external (which i dont believe you can do anyway, unless you use target disk mode) then clone again. you have just doubled the time it will take.

Apples way: back everything up onto a time machine back up, remove drive, put new drive in, boot from discs, format drive, install OSX, then restore from backup.

Rob's right, an external enclosure would speed up the process, but if you don't want to spend the money, your method shouldn't take that long if you have the original system disks. I've done it many times.

1. Connect the external USB drive and boot to the DVD that came with the computer.
2. Once it boots, select Utilities->Disk Utility.
3. Highlight your internal hard drive, and click the New Image button. Save the image to the external. It'll do a block copy of the internal hard drive to a DMG file on the external.
4. Once complete, replace the internal drive with the new one, boot the computer the same way, and launch Disk Utility again.
5. Format the new drive, single partition, GUID partition map.
6. Click on the Restore button. Select the internal drive as the destination, the DMG as the source and click OK.

If your external is a 2.5 form factor you could just use that as your new hdd if you wanted and put your current hdd in the enclose as your backup. just throwing it out there.