Upgrade HardDrive in MBP

I heard that upgrading the Hard Drive in my MBP will void my warranty. Is there someway to upgrade it without voiding my warranty?

Thanks

 

You can take it to an authorized Apple service center or Apple Store. They should be able to hook you up. Be prepare to spend some $$.

 

Yeaps, you can have a hard drive installed by an Apple Certified technician if you want to get your own hard drive and don't want to void the warranty.

 

Technically speaking, if you successfully upgrade the hard drive yourself, it's unlikely that your warranty will be truly voided. That is, I personally haven't heard of a scenario where someone upgraded their own hard drive, and then in the future Apple told them their warranty was voided.

The main issue would be that if you damaged your computer in the course of upgrading the hard drive, that damage would not be something Apple would cover under warranty (and they could possibly void your warranty at that point).

So if you felt comfortable with the upgrade process, you could try it yourself - and as long as you were careful, you shouldn't have much to worry about.

-Zadillo

 

I feel comfortable upgrading it myself. I have built 3 pcs so far and upgraded them numerous times. I thought there might be a sticker that says "Warranty Void if removed" and I'd have to remove that sticker to get the hard drive out.

 

According to this
"Replacing your MacBook Pro hard drive requires some minor surgery, and it will void your warranty"

Thats what i was concerned about

 

I've changed a few of them and it can be a bit nerve racking the first time. The hardest part is making sure you keep track of where all the screws go and using the right technique to separate the palmrest/keyboard from the body. I lift the rear of the top cover first and hinge it upward pivoting at the front edge. You'll hear lots of popping but that's normal.

 

No, there isn't. I upgraded mine and there is no sticker. So I assume the warranty is not voided.

Of course, if you screw up while upgrading, damage anything inside, you are probably SOL

I followed one of the instructions pages on the web. Download the iFixit guide - which is almost 1:1 correct, there are some minor changes for santa rosa MBPs that are not in the guide but they are obvious.
I printed out the guide, and as I took off screws taped the screws with the corresponding steps / pictures onto the printed out guide. I also took pictures with the digi cam before disassembling stuff but I ended up not needing them.

The most nerve-wrecking part is taking off the top case. You kinda have to wiggle it around to get the front to disengage, but you can't wiggle too hard or too far so you don't break the very thin keyboard cable. And when the front snaps finally disengage, it sounds like something breaking.

I wish there was a picture of the things that hold down the front of the top case so I'd know how exactly that works. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of that or even look at it closely before snapping it back in - and I ain't doing it again unless I have to

 

Question - my original hard drive, a 120GB model, had a small metal disc attached to the top. Do you know what that's for and do all MBP Santa Rosa HDs have that? It's not part of the hard disk as I managed to pry it off, but it's glued onto the HD pretty tight.

My guess would be that this makes contact to the aluminium top case for added cooling.... I didn't glue it to my replacement HD, BTW.

 

Orthorim, did you notice any performance increase with the 7200rpm drive? and did your battery life get any shorter?

 

Performance is excellent, I have no complaints.

But whether or not you see an improvement really depends on the task.
I initially did the upgrade so I could compile my projects faster. However, it turns out that this was not a disk-bound activity because - I assume - the OS X cache is so good that it the new drive is only a little bit better than the old one. I didn't run with the old drive long enough to compare any other real world tasks like copying etc.

In comparison tests on barefeats.com, the 200GB / 7200 Hitachi drive is 2x as fast as my old drive + way faster than any other notebook drive out there. So if you want to make sure you have the fastest possible - go for it
See here: http://www.barefeats.com/rosa06.html

I did not see a decrease in battery life as far as I can tell. If there is any difference, it's likely on the order of a few minutes. Turning the screen brightness up or down a notch has a bigger effect.

PS: There's some new 320GB notebook disks coming out soon + if they run @ 7200 RPM I'd think they will push my 200GB 7K200 off the top spot for performance.

PPS: The 7K200 is also very, very quiet. I cannot hear it unless it's totally silent, then there are some very faint clicks every now and then.

Recommended all around

 

Where did you get the Hitachi drive?

 

Newegg.com

 

I am planning on swapping out this tiny 120GB 5400RPM (stock) with a 200GB 7200RPM, but the prices are still expensive at this time. For the meantime, I'm using two external HDD's.

 

I'd wait for the 320GB monster if I were you, was recently announced...

 

this is definitely something that I'm interested in doing sometime soon. I was looking at the 7k200 you got, but if that 320gb drive will be 7200rpm, I'll get that instead, provided it's not (too) much more expensive.

about how long did it take you to do the transplant? I'm trying to gauge whether I feel comfortable doing it myself or not. I built my desktop myself, but have never really worked on a laptop (other than adding ram, which doesn't count).

 

I assumed it was to quell some of the HDD vibration. I first saw them in the original MBP.

 

OWC's video on replacing a MBP hard drive should also give you a good idea of what to expect, and whether you'll be comfortable with it:

http://www.macsales.com/clicks/fclick.php?id=96

 

I got to be honest, there is no way i would ever try to remove my hd and replace it.... however i can always dream cant i???

(to be honest with you i just use my external hd's for everything so i would really never need one)

 

Took me about 1 hour of work time + 1 hour of preparation, printing the guides etc. And maybe another hour or so to calm my nerves enough to open up a brand spankin' new MBP...

I just remember I made a mistake when installing the new drive. I thought I was being clever and had the new drive in an external enclosure first & copied over OS X. The problem was just that A) The software I used (PSyncX) didn't work, resulting in an unusable copy and B) I partioned the new drive using Apple partition scheme. That's bad - you must partition the new drive using GUID partition scheme or firmware updates will not work! GUID partition is the default for built-in drives so if you installed the drive before partitioning, you are fine. But I partitioned it before-hand in an external enclosure and so Apple partition scheme was the default.

Apple recommends GUID partition scheme for all OS X drives bootable on Intel machines. Apple partition scheme seems to work though, except when you try to do a Firmware update. And that took me a long time to figure out because the error message is meaningless and it's not well documented.

So make sure to partition GUID partition scheme.

BTW I ended up the backup/restore function in Disk Utility to clone my old internal drive. Worked like a charm.

 

let's say if we were to take it down to an apple store .....
how much $$$$ are we talking abt ? ( i'm a computer noob so doing it myself is no option)
also .... if they upgrade the HD does it mean removing my old one ( losing my old data) and inserting a new one ? Or does it add up to the original HD?

thank you =]

 

I don't have any price estimate for you...but yes, you're right on the second question. You will take out the original HD and replace it with a new one. Not many portable notebooks have the ability to add a second internal hard drive.

 

While its true you have to take out the old one to put in a new one, you can get a SATA 2.5 inch caddy to put the old drive in so it becomes a USB2/FW external drive, I do this all the time whenever I get a new 2.5 incher.

 

Suppose I were to buy my own notebook hard-drive, and take both the MBP and the new drive to the apple store to have them install it. Would that work and NOT void my warranty?

Edit: Nevermind, I saw the post by Sam on the first page of this thread saying that is a possibility.