Upgrading hard drive in MacBook 2,1

2.5" form factor SATA drive (1.5 Mbit/sec or 3.0 Mbit/sec should be fine). 9.5mm drive thickness. What you can get would depend on your budget and what your requirements are. I'm guessing your original drive is small - maybe 60 or 80 GB. You could easily go big - up to 500 GB right now. Or you could go for faster and bigger with a 3200 7200 RPM drive, or even the new Seagate 500 GB 7200 RPM drive. There are also smaller capacities on the market.

The installation is easy. Once cooled down, I could install a new drive in less than 5 minutes (taking my time) with three tools. The most time will be spent either reinstalling OSX from scratch or cloning your drive with an external hard drive or enclosure.

You could probably do this for less than US $120 including all tools and a drive enclosure for the cloning process. That would mean maybe a 320 GB hard drive, a #00 Phillips screwdriver, and a T-8 Torx screwdriver. Toss in the cost of a 10 pence coin to remove the battery. 😉

Machieu wrote:
Thanks for the reply, you are right, my current drive is only 80GB, however I am hoping to upgrade to a MacBook Pro by the end of the year so don't want to go too crazy with the upgrade, probably more interested in speed than capacity (the base model MacBook Pro has a 250GB drive so I don't want to get used to anything larger than that and have to pay to upgrade the drive in that when I get it!)

Can you suggest any sites which are good for hard drives? (I used Crucial when I ungraded my RAM but haven't been able to find an equivalent site for hard drives)

If you were in the US - either Newegg or Best Buy. I did a search and this was one of the first to come up. I can't vouch for the business, but you can get an idea about prices. You'll need a Serial ATA drive - this business refers to them as SATA150 or SATA300.

http://www.macwarehouse.co.uk/catalogue/Components/Internal%20Hard%20Drives/Lapt op%20Hard%20Drives

This is one they have in stock - a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320 GB drive (with shock sensor) for £59.99. I'd recommend the one without the shock sensor (there can be strange panics when combined with the Apple Sudden Motion Sensor), but they don't have it in stock. You can turn off SMS through some Terminal commands.

http://www.macwarehouse.co.uk/catalogue/item/A0435693

Here's a disassembly tutorial. It's almost too easy.

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/MacBook-Core-2-Duo-Hard-Drive-Replacement/514 /1

The only drives that Crucial sells are the solid state drives. You might even consider those, although there is a cost and performance penalty. However - they are very robust (no moving parts) dead silent, use little power, and don't suffer from mechanical hard drive failures.

EDIT: I should also point out that I plan to start from scratch rather than cloning my current drive.

That makes things a bit easier. Do you intend on at least copying over your data?

Machieu wrote:
Yeh, I have heard of Newegg but don't think we have an equivalent her in the UK.

Thanks for the for the tips, I might head in to Oxford tomorrow and see if I can find somewhere selling drives (armed with all the details you guys have given me!), sadly as cool as SSD's are though they're way too expensive for me at the moment so think I'll be steering clear of them until the price drops!

I don't plan on getting an SSD either, until the prices go down and the capacity/performance go up.

Also, I have a SeaGate external drive which I use for backups so I will copy all my files onto the new drive from that, is installing OS X onto the new drive as easy as putting the new drive in and then sticking the OS X disc in or is there more to it than that?

You would need to format the drive in HFS+. I did it by cloning my drive first, installing the new internal drive, then formatting it with Disk Utility running on the external drive. You can also run Disk Utility from your original install discs. There is a list of utilities you can run from the install discs without actually installing the original version of OSX. I'm not sure, but I don't think you can run Disk Utility from a retail copy of Leopard.

You might consider doing an original install of Tiger, since the original install discs should include iLife. Then you could upgrade to Leopard.

Machieu wrote:
I tried booting from my copy of Leopard and was able to run the Disk Utility software so that isn't a problem, do I just use the 'Erase' option to format the drive? and is it Mac OS Extended (Journaled) that I want to format it as?

Erase is just format. I didn't do it at the time I formatted my replacement drive, but if you want a check of your new drive for bad sectors, I think you can also add security options like zero write, or even a 7-pass erase (aka "government wipe"). Yes - you probably want Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which is also called HFS+.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus

Also, I installed iLife from my original Tiger disc onto Leopard when I got it (without having to install the whole OS) so that shouldn't be a problem.

Never did it myself. I always did OSX upgrades where the previous applications were maintained and never actually tried doing a partial restore from the install discs.