I have been using my MacBook pro for 7 months now and I am a proud customer. Though I do most of my work in Windows, I use Mac for personal use like browsing, importing photos (I just love iPhoto), organizing personal files and most importantly – syncing my iPhone 4 with it.
After a while I realized that my MacBook is a great piece of machine except that it is slow. I noticed that I do not use much space on the hard drive. I do not have many apps installed and mostly the laptop is just used to stay online.
The most straight forward upgrade for any computer in terms of speed is SSD. To explain the benefits of SSD, I need to derail from the topic of this post, so I will save that for later. I bought this SSD from Delta Peripherals in Chennai for Rs.5,300 Approx. I did not need a bigger capacity SSD and this fit nicely in my budget.
The Upgrade Process
I thought that opening a MacBook Pro and installing an SSD was something like a brain surgery, but it turned out to be much simpler than I thought. It’s just that the components inside are so small and you need delicate hands. Especially while removing the old hard disk, you need to handle the SATA cable carefully.
I will not go through the whole process of upgrading, as it is already covered in the video below. If you want to buy the screw drivers in India you can buy Jackly 31 in 1 screw driver set which is available in ebay.in for about Rs.100
After physically installing the drive I inserted my Mac OS X Lion DVD into the optical drive. If you have upgraded to Lion and do not have the .dmg file you can get one from the internet.
Just burn the .dmg file into a DVD and you have the installation medium ready. I booted up my MacBook Pro using the DVD. I am following this procedure because I am doing a clean install and taking my MacBook Pro to a fresh condition without carrying any of the excess baggage (used software and unorganized files) in my old setup.
You first have to partition the new SSD in Mac Extended Journaled format. You can do this from the disk utility provided in the installation disc itself. Just click erase and select the format. Erase it and you are done. Close the disk utility and you can move on to the installation.
The installation took around 20 minutes to complete. Another 10 minutes for me to enter the details and I was done. Now my boot up speed is at least twice as fast and I am going to sleep today with great satisfaction – having done the best possible upgrade for my MacBook Pro at a very affordable price.