I am upgrading the standard hard drive in my 2007 17in MacBook Pro to a solid state drive (SSD). “Winona” has been showing her age in recently years and I wanted to spruce her up a little bit. And yes, I name my computer equipment (shout out to all of those Farscape fans out there).
The ram in “Winona” was already maxed out so the best bang for the buck upgrade in terms of price and performance was a solid state drive upgrade. Now that I have more leeway in my research and profession endeavors after receiving tenure, I am planning on doing more work with Apple related programs such as iBook Author, Adobe DPS, and xCode to develop interactive teaching applications for the students in the programs that I oversee. It will help to have a decent backup machine for basic tasks, and baring Apple phasing out application support for Snow Leopard (10.6.8), “Winona” can last me a little while longer as my “side piece”.
The process of cloning the data on the old drive to the new SSD is always pretty painless with the right software (I used the free edition of Carbon Copy Cloner). The difficulty in this upgrade was in how complex the laptop cases were designed prior to the new uni-body construction that Apple adopted in 2009. I probably should have waited until the kids went to sleep because if I lost any of the screws I would have been …….. screwed. Luckily I didn’t have any problems.
The uni-body design in “Dorothy”, my 2009 MacBook Pro, makes it so much easier to get to the guts of the machine and upgrade any components. Now that I have finished “Winona” I am going to upgrade “Dorothy” with a 500gb SSD and a second 750gb standard hard drive to replace the optical DVD drive. Since I rarely use DVDs any longer, and can place the existing Superdrive in an external case for the rare times that I actually need a DVD player, “Dorothy” will be set for a few move years of use.