After I purchased Dora the Explorer, Season One from the iTunes Store, I discovered that it was also time to upgrade the hard drive inside the MacBook Pro. With only 4GB free, I decided that I should not wait any longer. There were only so many file that I could delete without regret.

So, I headed to Other World Computing and purchased a Hitachi 500GB Travelstar 5K500, which is suitable only for the MacBook Pro 17-inch. OWC also was selling a Samsung 500GB Spinpoint M6, which should fit inside a MacBook Pro 15-inch. I also picked up an OWC On-The-Go Firewire 800 case.

When the hard drive arrived, I inserted it into the OWC case and connected it to the MacBook Pro. After I formatted the new drive using Disk Utility, I cloned my 160GB Fujitsu internal hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner. This took about 3 1/2 hours. In retrospect, I think the Firewire 800 case was overkill. I would have been fine with a Firewire 400 case. Anyways, I designated the external drive as the Startup Drive (under System Preferences) and rebooted the MacBook Pro. With the MacBook Pro starting up without any problems, I knew that the hard drive was good to go.

Next, I followed the instructions on iFixit for installing a hard drive on a MacBook Pro 17″. Just follow the instructions and keep your screws labelled. After each step, I placed the screws on a piece of white paper and wrote down the location and step associated with the screws. The only problem I came across was one screw that I couldn’t loosen. A friend stopped by and used a flat-head screwdriver to remove it. Other than that, it was pretty straightforward.

Once the MacBook Pro was reassembled, I started it up. System Profiler now shows a Hitachi hard drive with a capacity of 465.44 GB. Not quite 500 GB.

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