Upgrading the Internal Storage of a Mac
Posted Friday 07 February 2020 at 19:10
Estimated reading time: 7 mins
A few years ago, my dad bought a second-hand Mac, and for pretty much as long as we've had it it's been low on storage. The previous owner had fitted it with a 120GB SSD, which, while fast, is incredibly small by today's standards. Installing the full Adobe suite had it brimming; there wasn't even enough space left for us to update to a newer version of OS X. We wanted to upgrade it.
We learned about the possibility of installing a dual-hard drive kit, which would allow us to install a second drive alongside the original. I'm lead to believe that Apple offered dual-hard drive models that used exactly the same logic board as the regular models, so all the compatible Macs have an unused hard drive connector on their logic boards. We decided to go for it.
Buying the Components
We bought this dual hard drive kit on Amazon on recommendation, which comes with all of the necessary tools for the disassembly as well as all the screws and other components needed for fitting the second hard drive. The new drive we bought is this Crucial 2TB SSD. At the time of purchase it was on a limited offer, so we got it around 25% cheaper. The ratings and reviews of the drive were overall very positive, but there were a few 1 star reviews I found a little worrying, claiming the drive was very slow or failed after only a few days. We got the drive anyway, as Crucial are generally a very good and trustworthy brand, concluding that, if it was no good, we had a month to return it to Amazon if we weren't happy.
Backing Up
Before doing anything, I obviously wanted to make a backup. Since there was the potential for a lot to go wrong here, I wanted to make a full backup of the current drive so that if anything went wrong with the new drive we'd be able to just buy a new drive and restore this backup.
While I would ordinarily use Clonezilla for this, Macs have their own built-in backup utility, Time Machine, that should make automatic backups. Since the drive we use for backups is normally left connected, it did indeed have a very recent backup available (within 24 hours), and nothing had really changed since then (except for, perhaps, a couple of DOOM saves). Nonetheless, it put my mind at ease to make a properly up-to-date backup before proceeding with the upgrade.
Apple backup utilities are always a bit hit or miss. I sat staring at "Preparing backup..." for a while, wondering whether it was actually doing anything or whether it had crashed. Eventually, though, I got a progress bar, and despite claiming the backup would take only 5 minutes, it obviously took 15.
(not that that's a particularly long time for a backup -- imaging the whole drive would've taken much much longer. I just love the way they always manage to underestimate how long it'll take)
Disassembly
The next step was the disassembly. The Macs are quite compact internally and require a couple of specialist tools to take apart (Torx screwdrivers, a logic board removal tool, etc.). We had most of them already from self-fixing an old iPhone 4, though the kit came with all of them. The plan was just to follow this guide from iFixit on installing the kit.
This was my first time taking apart a Mac, and looking back it's more like disassembling a laptop than a PC. Everything is crammed in quite tightly to give them their form factor, so the disassembly can be a bit at certain points, but it is really impressive. The disassembly for this particular upgrade takes literally everything out of the case to get at the hard drive rack, so I got to see pretty much everything inside in the process.
I won't go into too much detail as the iFixit guide explains it well, but just a couple of thought for anyone who wants to do it themselves but doesn't have much experience:
- Make sure to take photos as you disassemble. You don't want to get to the end and forget where something goes. The iFixit photos in a lot of cases are great, but if there's anything about your model that might be slightly different you'll want to know how it was.
- Have a dedicated area to put your screws in. You may even want a small magnetic strip to hold them in place, but a piece of paper with labelled squares drawn on it is sufficient.
- Most importantly, make sure your Mac is fully disconnected before you disassemble it! You don't want to get an electric shock from it. The advice I usually follow is to disconnect it and hold down the power button for a few seconds, then leave it for a few minutes to let everything fully discharge.
One thing to be wary of is that your grub screws can be screwed in too far. I didn't notice this and ended up losing a screw inside the SSD. We were able to retrieve this from inside the SSD (hopefully without damaging it!) and got it all fitted, but it's better to avoid making the mistake if you can as it may not be as easy for every SSD.
The only real deviation I had to make from the iFixit guide was because of the screws my kit came with. The guide seemed to use a set of four grub screws, whereas the kit I bought came with two Phillips head screws and two grub screws. The Phillips head screws had to be fitted on the side closest to the logic board, otherwise the extra width added by the heads of the screws made it impossible to reassemble the Mac.
Moving the OS to the New Drive
Originally I intended to use the Mac's Disk Utility to clone the original drive onto the new one, but for whatever reason it simply wouldn't allow me to do it and failed every time I tried. What I opted to do in the end was to boot into the recovery partition and reinstall OS X to the new drive, then restore from a Time Machine backup. The Mac makes this easy enough to do; simply hold ⌥ whilst booting, select Recovery, and finally Reinstall OS X. When prompted, just select the new drive as the destination (though it may be required to use the Disk Utility first to create a partition, like I did). When the computer reboots you'll have to progress through a couple of menus (keyboard layout, WiFi settings, etc.) before you reach the option to set it up from a Time Machine backup. This option not only supports restoring from the backup on the external drive, but also restoring from the existing version of OS X installed on the original hard drive. True to form, everything took longer than the progress bar claimed it would, but eventually it rebooted and everything was back to the way it was.
Finishing Up
To be on the safe side, I'm going to leave the original drive as it was for now, just in case the new drive fails or turns out to be too slow before the Amazon returns policy runs out, though from the testing we did with it that evening I suspect it'll be fine. It's a huge upgrade on storage regardless of it's speed, so we'll probably leave it in and replace the other SSD with a similarly-sized, but faster, drive if necessary. I can't see any noticeable slowdown based on the testing we did; if anything, it's faster than the original drive! We'll see in time how good a drive it really is, but it solves the problem we had and I'm happy with the result. Based on it's performance so far, I think the poor reviews were either unfortunate failures or malicious trolling. The disassembly itself was easy enough to do, despite the occasional hiccup along the way, and it was interesting to see the inner workings of the Mac. Overall, a successful mod, one I'd definitely recommend doing if your Mac is a little stretched for storage like ours was.