Just upgraded hard drive on MBP

After upgrading my 120 gig hard drive on my MBP to a 160 gig, I'm wondering why Apple voids the warranty if you do that? Other than about 19 screws that you have to remove and all the innards being exposed, it really wasn't that difficult. If you're careful, there's not much chance of anything bad happening except you might lose a screw.

Anyhow, OS X is happily installing on the new hard drive right now and I should be back in business tomorrow.

 

nice! Ya, I've seen the play by play on that proceedure.. and it looks about as easy as you said. It would really be nice if apple just figured out how to make this a user upgrade like in the MB. I'm guessing it doesnt' cost much to have it installed by a service center though.

 

Cool. I'm wondering if I can get get a larger hybrid drive installed by apple when they come out.
I'd love like,a 200 gig 7200 rpm hybrid drive :-D

 

what are the max size and speed at the moment? what are the specs for the internal drive?

 

Because most computer users aren't as secure in doing it as you or I would be So Apple (wisely) doesn't want people messing with something they don't fully understand and then have to pick up the bill for fixing what they break in doing so.

The Macbook solution is great, it would be nice if that solution or something similar came to the MBP in a future incarnation also.

@ neilk2350:
Max size that you can choose for a MBP right now is 200GB, 4200rpm.
Max speed is 100GB, 7200rpm (only available for the 17" now though it seems, for some reason).
There are also 120 and 160GB drives running at 5400rpm.

 

Hrm, my question is, if I upgraded the drive, say with a 200gb 7200 rpm drive (if they ever come out) and say, I need to send it back... I pop in the original drive, do you think they will ever know?

 

I am pretty sure there is lovely warranty tape that needs to be removed. I am also pretty sure that the only part of the warranty that is voided is the hard drive. The rest of the warranty should be good. Don't quote me on that, but I think I remember a conversation I had with AppleCare and they said only the hard drive warranty would be void. Call Apple and ask, can't hurt.

 

Word, I might do that. With the upcoming release of new laptop hard drives, I may upgrade in a few months.

Running boot camp and 3 OS's under Parallels really eats into disk space...

 

In my experience, there is no warranty tape that I found when I swapped the hard drive out. There was some sticky stuff under the ribbon cable that runs from the hard drive connector to the bluetooth module. I think it's only purpose was to keep the ribbon cable close to the hard drive.

When I put in the new hard drive, there was still enough sticky stuff to make the ribbon cable stick to the new hard drive.

I did keep the original hard drive just in case I need to take it in for warranty work.

For those who want to follow suit, remember the MBP and MB require an SATA hard drive, so don't get an IDE hard drive by accident. I purchased mine from a company called MCE who sells replacement hard drive kits. The kid includes a strap that you can put around your wrist and attach to a ground surface to avoid static shock. It also includes a pretty crappy screwdriver and two little L shaped wrenches that are needed to loosen two torque screws.

I actually used a small phillips head screwdriver that worked nicely and even removed the torque screws.

The kit from MCE also includes a step by step procedure on how to remove the hard drive from the MBP. The kit is an extra $ 50 over the price of the drive itself.

Here some interesting things that I noticed after re-installing OSX.

1. My backlight on my keyboard never seemed to work at the right time - you know, dim lighting. Now it works perfectly and comes on when the light is dim. Never realized how useful this is; probably because it never worked properly.

2. I now have my airport status working on my menu bar. Before it always reported that the airport was not turned on and didn't show any available networks that I could connect to. It would connect, just wouldn't give me any choice unless I used the "assistant" in System Preferences.

3. It will now auto-connect to my Airport Extreme at the office and at home. Before, the only way I could get it to connect was to run the assistant and create a new location every single time I went home or to the office. What a pia.

All in all, this has been a very rewarding experience. I now have everything working the way it should and an extra 60 gig of hard drive space.

One last thing I'll add... I was a little concerned about losing my Parallels WinXP guest vm, but I backed up the .hdd and .pvs files just before installing the new hard drive. I then copied them back to the new hard drive and was able to retain all my installed apps, data, etc. without any problems. Strangely, I had to re-activate all the MS apps like Office, but not WinXP. I did have to call MS to activate Office, but I just told them I had to re-install a new hard drive after a crash.

I was also able to copy my iTunes library and iPhoto library onto the new hard drive from my SuperDupe backup and ran into no glitches at all.

This was a great learning experience and re-enforces my faith in SuperDuper and a super duper backup program.

OSX took about an hour and a half to re-install, but it's pretty much put in disk one and let it go till it asks for disk two. Before you can install, you have to partition your new hard drive, but there is a "Utilities" option in the OS X Install menu that allows you to do this. Very handy.

hollownail - If you find a 200 gig 7200 rpm hard drive, let me know. I'd upgrade in a minute. Of course battery life will probably suffer since I think this is why they currently don't offer one.

 

Hey, I just took mine apart this weekend. There was a leak in the cealing from the guys that live in the other part of the house... so my MBP got all wet.
Dried it off, then took it apart to see if there was any damage (it was plugged in and running at the time).
Not as bad to take apart as I thought. Took me a bit to realize I had to remove the torque screws. All in all, pretty easy.
The case is more flush now that I did that too.