I’ve been trying to keep my 160GB original drive relatively clean, but after a while, the music and 4GB XCode beta downloads just ate up all the space and I got the dreaded “your startup drive is running low on space” message with about 200MB left.

Alrighty!  Time to order a new drive!  I considered an SSD for speed, but I’m not rich enough to buy a big SSD drive, nor do Macs have TRIM support which SSDs need or they degrade over time, unless you get an OWC auto-balancing drive but again those are big bucks.

I looked into the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives that have some flash in them to give you a partial SSD-like boost, but they seem to have some firmware issues.  Yes some people have found a firmware update that works for them, but I don’t want to deal with it – I want a drive that just works.

Western Digital is my go-to drive of choice these days for both laptops and desktops.  I’ve got a 1TB black and a 1TB green in my Windows machine that sync nightly (yes I run both OSX and Winders), and I started looking at the 500GB WD Black laptop drives, but too many people talked about vibration and noise from them.  The WD Blue 500GB, however, has glowing reviews all around, aside from the odd DOA report but that happens for all drives and Amazon has a great return policy so I just ignore that.  Also order this enclosure (or something similar), assuming you’ve got a spare mini USB cable lying around as the one that comes with it is garbage.

To transfer the data from your old hard drive to the new one when it arrives, pop open the enclosure, pull out the little interface board which is likely not even glued down, and throw away the enclosure case.  Okay you could keep it, but you don’t need it.  Plug the interface board onto your shiny new hard drive and attach it to your Mac with a good mini USB cable (directly to the Macbook, not through a hub, so it gets enough power).  Follow these nifty instructions to format the drive and clone your data.  I recommend disabling wifi, pulling your ethernet cable, and shutting down all apps including DropBox and such while doing the sync, to avoid much of any new data being written to your old hard drive while the sync is going.

Now once it’s down, you need to remove your old drive and put in the new one.  The hard drive is right under the battery hatch which opens easily, but the screws in there are easy to strip.  Get thee to Harbor Freight and spend $8 to get this nifty screwdriver kit with a whole bunch of tiny bits for all the stuff you’re likely to find in your computers.  Use a PH0 bit to take out the drive retaining bracket, and then a T6 to move the drive studs from the old drive to the new drive.  Put it all back in, fire up your Mac, and bask in the glory of your awesome skillz!

UPDATE – you may need to load up “hdapm” which is a tiny background program that sets your shiny new drive to _not_ spin down all the time, in order to get rid of a clicking sound that happens every few seconds while OSX and/or the drive decide to take a siesta and spin down, only to spin up a few microseconds later.  Save wear and tear on your drive as well as reduce noise – go get the nice new hdapm installer package and run it – no config necessary!

One of the tiny little springs in the screen latches that hold my T20 closed gave out the other day, and the latch was basically useless and stuck open. So the ol’ T20 would wake up from sleep in my briefcase, because it would open up just enough when bouncing around to think I had opened the screen. *sigh*

Luckily, it was easy enough to find the maintenance manual for it, so that I could take it apart. And a simple ballpoint pen spring, cut in half, was a perfect upgrade to the crappy little springs that were in there.

I love it when I can fix something physical about a computer, instead of having to unscrew winders yet again