This is entirely a geeky thing (consider yourself warned). I had a revelation many weeks ago when I was trying to figure out what to do about having endless strings of external hard drives connected to my Mac Mini because my iTunes library didn’t fit on the Mini’s puny 60GB (5400 RPM) hard disk. Add to that wanted to use the Mini as a media center and have my DVDs stored for quick retrieval on said hard drive(s). This was also during the summer when I could hear the poor little fans on the collection of hard drives spinning up in a feeble attempt to stay working in the Florida heat. Then it dawn on my heat/humidity addled mind, install a bigger hard drive you big dope! At the time the sweet spot for drive size vs. price was 320GB for under $200, so I ordered one, found a “How to Replace Your Mac Mini Hard Drive” video on the web and presto-chango, my mini was up and running with three times the space and almost two times the speed. Now all I need to do is figure out which compression to use for storing my gigantic DVD collection… I could only get three Star Trek series (Classic, Next Gen & DS9) to fit on a 1 terabyte drive in their native Mpeg2 format. Ack. Then my thoughts turned to my macbook pro, which has had a 150GB external drive dangling from it for over a year….

I’ve been building PCs and futzing with the guts of my computers literally for decades, going all the way back to my first Kaypros that used a long dead MFM hard disk interface (I think it was an upgrade up to 20MBs!). But those were PCs, held together by four screws and broken promises. The one computer model one normally does not do home upgrades is the laptop and the one company one could never do an upgrade to was Apple. At least that’s what we tell mom and dad when they’re thinking about which computer to get (laptops aren’t upgradable and Macs are only “Apple upgradable” if at all). But like I said, I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, so I’m relatively fearless when it comes to popping the top of any computer, including my tiny Sony Vaio laptop. What I tell mom and dad doesn’t apply to me.

All that being said, I have to say that the first time I opened up my Mac Mini I had a near geek-asmic moment. Having spent so many years trolling through the insides of countless PCs that all reminded me of someone’s neglected garage with cables and crap thrown all over the place, I was unprepared for the shear engineering elegance of the little device. I was literally taken aback, and seriously thought about leaving the outer case off because the design was so worth admiring. Did I mention that this was going to be a geek-fest? Alas, the reality of living with lots of dust and other flying things “encouraged” me to let all that engineering beauty hide under the pearl-white case. Damn. So I had no doubt that when I opened my macbook pro I’d find the same engineering beauty. First things first, I went out on the web and found a very well spelled out tutorial on how to do the deed. I found my guide at ifixit.com.

When I did the Mac Mini I also had the support of a tutorial video (see video on the bottom of the page). But for the macbook pro I decided to go just with the written tutorial. 30-minutes later my little beast had almost two times the disk space and twice the speed. Let’s just say that it went so smoothly and I’m so impressed with the performance boost that I took two days to write this blog entry to share my geek joy with you. Aren’t you glad that’s what I was doing while our nation was electing it’s first not-white president? It’s all good. jbb