- Hard drive
I found some sound instructions on the how-to aspect of the HDD here: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/58220-upgrade-your-macbook-pros-hard-drive-2/10
Now I just have to choose a drive. I am going to look at a Solid State Drive, if I can convince myself it will work, and it is not going to cost close to the price of a brand new machine. First of all, will it work? OSX 10.6.8 included support for TRIM enabled drives which is a good thing, but it seems to be a bit of a black art to chosing a drive that will work with OSX TRIM support (if you buy a pre-installed drive from Apple, it'll work fine, but if you do it yourself, there's no telling). To help me remember what I found, here is a link.
TRIM support
http://osxdaily.com/2011/03/27/enable-trim-ssd-mac-os-x-10-6-7/
Next it was time to look at a SSD. I looked at various sources until I found this one, from a reputable supplier in the UK http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=90A9989AA5CA7304
A review of this drive was found here, and it seems to be pretty good, receiving both "Dam Good." and "Dam Good Value."
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/45718-crucial-m4-256gb-ssd-review-12.html
Having decided this was the right man for the jeorb I decided to check out the price of a bigger (at least 320GB) 7200 RPM drive, just to compare. Given that in the above review, even the worst performance in the most degraded, non-TRIM state resulted in speeds FASTER than the WD Velociraptor I know that this is not a cutting-edge technology, but would still represent an increase in speed and capacity from the stock drive. So a quick google search turned up that at major retailers the WD Black Scorpion 320 GB is going for about 60-90 GBP. Then I checked Amazon.co.uk and found a brand new one for 55 GPB plus shipping (about 5 pounds)!
So, for 20% of the price you get a 50% reduction in speed and 50% increase in capacity, without having to deal with TRIM issues... I think I might leave the SSD for the NEXT upgrade!
- RAM
Currently the book has 2 GB DDR3 1067 MHz so I'll have to check out what speed the machine can support and how much. I will probably aim for 4GB (of the fastest possible of course). A quick search at crucial.com shows that an 8GB kit is going for 36 pounds. Wow. That is NOT going to break the bank. Infact that's so good I am going to see how much it would be to upgrade the iMac as well...
Link to Apple support page for iMac.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1423?viewlocale=en_US#2
www.crucial.com supplied the RAM for both upgrades and, with free shipping, came out at very good value for a total of 12GB of RAM (8+4). The website also has a very easy way of finding which RAM you need for your computer and their database is pretty extensive. For a laugh I put in the details of my OLD Compaq TC1100 tablet and it found the right module, at a reasonable price, and even warned me that the second slot is not accessible by the end user. Nice.
Installing the RAM is very easy in both the iMac and the MacBook Pro. Instructions can be found at various places around the the Mac support pages. When I first did the laptop I didn't press one of the DIMMs in far enough so all I got was beeping when I turned it back on. That was easily fixed and after that I had no issues. I wouldn't mind getting in there with an anti-static vacuum cleaner though, there is A LOT of dust in there.
Next up is the HDD in the MacBook Pro. I still have my eye on this one, from WD. It seems to only be available on Amazon.co.uk, which is fine. Seems I might have missed the boat on the price though. Now up to 70-80 pounds, although that's only 10-15 more than 2 weeks ago, it's still annoying!
Some more useful links:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20080989-263/how-to-create-an-os-x-lion-installation-disc/
Disk Inventory X - It's like WinDirStat for Mac.
