Couple questions about upgrading the hard drive in MBP's

1) I heard you have to pop the keyboard entire front panel off to do it, is that true? Why Is it not as easy to do as on a PC laptop where you just pop a small hard drive door off.

2) Does it void warranty upgrading the HD and ram?

 

Well it depends on the model. But if you have the 13" 2011 it should be a matter of removing the bottom panel of the laptop and then 2 torx screws to get the HD out, and no it should not void your warranty as long as you don't wreck anything in there. But if you ever bring it in for service I would switch back out to the old drive.

 

It is not much different than some PC laptops, really. Just the "size of the door" is different.

The entire bottom panel is held in place by several screws. Removing said panel is the extent of disassembly of the outer case that is required.

Here is an example. MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Mid 2010 Hard Drive Replacement - iFixit

No, it does not void any warranties to upgrade the HDD or the memory in a MBP.

 

Please don't make such comments unless you are sure of the policy or the practical application in actual cases of Apple notebooks.

One does *not* need to replace an upgraded HDD with the original prior to service -- Apple does not care, and never has, and my original drive is 3 replacements ago. Apple does not, as compared to some other OEMs (Asus) sometimes do strange things like swap drives on a unit being serviced by their technical staff.

For portable products like the iPod/Phone lines, you absolutely need to pull anything and everything off since any replacement will always be a different unit from that which you submitted and you won't get your original back.

 

If you have a unibody MacBook Pro, upgrading the hard drive is as simple as in other notebooks. In pre-unibody models, you did have to take out the keyboard. It wasn't especially difficult, just time consuming.

Absolutely not on unibody systems.

 

I've worked for Applecare, If you send in a laptop for service there is no guarentee they wont both wipe your harddrive or put back in a standard OEM harddrive. So if you go in with a harddrive that was originally in the computer and doesn't have all of your data on it your data is safe and you know you'll get your harddrive because you already have it.

So don't make such comments.

 

Thats a good thing about buying your own hard drive... if you have to give the machine to Apple for warranty, swap the old original hard drive with a clean slate OS back in there and give it to them and keep your hard drive. Its cheaper to buy a drive 3rd party anyways, and just sit the original in an anti-static bag on the shelf just in case you need it.

 

Ditto. Service Tech's do their job in quantity, they are not responsible for lost upgrades, and it happens all the time.

If the service tech is any good he or she will check out the entire notebook while it is in for service and not just for what it was sent in for. If they find something else that is failing, but has not yet failed, they will replace it with OEM parts. This includes memory and hard drives.

Some Manufacturers will send the parts back if they recognize that the parts are upgraded, but most get lost in the shuffle.

 

if i put my SSD in a MBP and sent it to apple and they replaced it with a OEM HD, id be utterly pissed.

 

Which is why you never send in a product with aftermarket parts unless the warranty service explicitly states that you can do so. It doesn't matter if you go with Dell, Asus, Acer, HP, Apple, Toshiba, Samsung, or ANY other manufacturer or warranty. I could buy an HP desktop from Best Buy, plop in a 2TB hard drive and 32GB of RAM, take it into their so called Geek Squad service, and they could replace everything back to factory standards (even though they would technically have to verify that my aftermarket upgrades are the cause of my problems).

That is why you always want to save the OEM parts that came with computers as you might have to put them back into place before getting the unit serviced. It has always been this way even dating back to my initial purchases in 1995 and 1997.