I followed instructions I found on the web here and here to replace the drive. As it happens, you need a Torx T-6 driver to remove two of the many screws that have to come out to get at the hard drive. I had to wait until Sunday when I could get the necessary tools to crack the case as a result. Many PC type computers I’ve worked with make replacement of internal components quite simple. Field Replaceable Units (FRUs) they call them. Well, if the difficulty of accessing and removing/replacing components in a Mac is any indication of the reliability of said components, my mind has been put at ease. I had to remove something like 17 screws (teeny weenie screws at that!) to open the case and get at the hard drive in my MacBook Pro.

The video instructions had a step to install the new drive in a USB case, open Disk Utility and copy the old disk partition onto the new drive, so I did that. The I went through the tedious process of removing all the screws, opening the case and removing the old drive. The instructions were very accurate and complete in this regard. I removed the old drive and installed the new drive, a 320 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drive. The old drive is 120 GB 5400 RPM Fuji.

After replacing all the screws to reassemble the case I pressed the power switch to boot the computer and was very disappointed when it did not boot off the new drive. So I inserted the Snow Leopard DVD and booted off that. I restored the backup from Time Machine to the new drive and rebooted. Merde! The drive continued to fail to boot. In the end I installed a fresh copy of Snow Leopard and on first boot it asked if I wanted to transfer information from another image or a backup or network location. I plugged in the old drive (now mounted in the USB case) and chose that. It copied over all the user settings, applications, files, etc to the new drive and I was back in business with a new, larger, faster hard drive, and a spare 120 GB USB drive for music backup.

I’m pleased with the result. My Acer had 160 GB. I now have 320 GB and it’s nice and quick. The new drive cost me $72.99 CDN. Next I’ll upgrade the RAM.

Those who know me are shocked, to say the least. I’ve been a PC all my life. (Not entirely true because I’ve been a Penguin for the past five years.) I develop software on a PC for a living. But I started looking at NetBooks, and as an alternative I decided to consider an upgrade to something more powerful than the Acer Aspire 5720Z that I’ve been running Ubuntu on since it was purchased new three years ago. The Acer has a 1.6GHz Dual Core processor and shared video, but the real downfall is the poor FireWire firmware. I am a musician and FireWire is the preferred interface for getting high-quality audio into a laptop. The MacBook Pro has a 2.16GHz Dual Core processor and 256Mb dedicated video. It also has both FireWire 400 and 800 ports. Macs are preferred for multimedia of all sorts and along with music I am also a photographer, so Apple seems to be a logical choice.

I’m really impressed. I can see why non-computer types gravitate to Macs. Buying a computer that is supported top-to-bottom by the manufacturer has tremendous appeal. Case-in-point: The Mac informed me of a software update this week. During the update the Mac performed an upgrade of the keyboard firmware in the laptop. Did I say I was impressed? If there is an upgrade to the firmware of my Acer I have to check the website to find out about it, download it, run a special program in Windows to apply it (or boot from a floppy image) and restart my OS. There is absolutely no link between the hardware vendor and the software vendor. And here is where the PC business model falls apart. A Mac is an integrated unit, not hardware from one source and an Operating System from another.

So far I’m a happy camper. Not everything is perfect. OS X cannot natively recognise Linux disk partitions, for one. But the computer is powerful and fast, even with only a gig of memory. We’ll see what happens when I load it up with four. Stay tuned …