debuggable

Hey folks,

here we go with post #9 of my 30 day challenge.

This isn't exactly a CakePHP / JS tip, but I feel like blogging about it ; ). For several weeks my MacBook Pro's HDD was maxed out. I had a 7200 RPM 160 GB HDD and since I have a ton (!) of music, pictures and a bootcamp partition this is close to nothing. When I finally had to spend 5-10 minutes every day just to keep the system running (OSX hates < 2GB of free HDD) I had to do something.

Since I didn't want to delete any of my data, I checked out additional hard drives. However, I was a little bit unhappy that there didn't seem to be any fast (7200 RPM) 2.5" harddrives with 300 GB or more. So eventually I decided that I had to sacrifice the fast speed if I wanted to go for big. And big I got:

What you see below is the Samsung SpinPoint M60S HM500LI, a 500 GB HDD with 5400 RPM and a 8mb buffer.

Here is a size comparison to the MacBook Pro:

So far so good. However, after I ordered the HDD it was laying around for quite a bit. Why? I was scared. Looking at the ifixit guide I knew the replacement would be quite involved. I mean now that I done it I know its nothing but taking out a couple of screws and cables and putting them back together. But boy did my hands shake while working on the internals of my little work buddy : ).

The beginning was easy. You take your Mac and take a before picture just in case you'll never see it again:

Then you turn it off and start by removing the battery:

Next you take off the little cover where the memory is located (I had already done that once before when putting 4GB Ram in):

Then you basically take out screws. Lots of them. It really helps to have the right tools as indicated in the ifixit guide. Especially the torx screw driver and spudger are things you don't want to miss.

Once you got all the screws out, you crack the case open. This is when it gets scary and your every move feels like you could destroy the little machine that is at the mercy of your hands:

In order to take the keyboard and top part of the case of you have to disconnect its wire. The trick is to carefully loose the yellow tape used to fixate the cable without knocking of any capacitors or shit. Once that is accomplished you are rewarded with this stunning picture:

The hard drive itself is located at the bottom left, and you need to lift up two yellow tapes again as well as disconnect the HDD:

Here is a close-up shot of the old drive that was in my MacBook:

And this is the HDD connector including the yellow tape fixating it:

Once you got all the cables and stuff off, you can take off the hdd. It has 4 bumpers and placeholders screwed to it which you need to transfer to the new drive. After that you basically just put all the stuff back in in reverse order and pray for the best. While I put my new drive in I suddenly had a little component hanging from one of the cables which I accidently pulled out. It turned out this simply was just placed in a little compartment left to the drive and I didn't rip anything. But boy was I scared ; ).

Anyway, after putting everything back together and booting up with the Leopard Install DVD, I was very happy to discover the surgery was a success! I formatted the new disk and recovered my data from a time machine Backup and things couldn't have been much smoother. The only thing I noticed is that I lost my mysql my.cnf file. It was located in /etc/private/my.cnf which unfortunately is excluded from the backup. Oh well, no biggie - after all I was just glad to not have killed my machine before leaving for the US today ; ).

Alright, hope some of you guys enjoyed the pictures. As far as I can tell there isn't much of a performance hit because of the slower RPM speed yet, but that's just my initial impression.

Oh and before I forget. From tomorrow on my time zone is EST since I'm in Atlanta. So my posts will be published by 9am EST not CET anymore.

-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined