Installing macOS on an SSD. How I changed the SSD in a MacBook Pro to an inexpensive, but capacious and fast one Tools for replacing a hard drive in a MacBook

Let us immediately note that the information will not be useful for owners of the most modern laptops, since, firstly, they come only with pre-installed solid-state drives, and secondly, the installed drives have an unconventional form factor and interface.
But for owners made in the 2.5” form factor and SATA interface, the presented instructions will help improve the performance of your laptop without significant costs.

You can, of course, contact the official service center Apple, but the service may turn out to be quite expensive, and besides, you will probably be offered some kind of Solit-State Drive Kit - “official, from the manufacturer”, the price of which, to put it mildly, will not correspond to the performance.

We, in turn, invite you to replace the HDD with an excellent SSD yourself and are ready to provide.

In the photos below you can see the SanDisk SSD. It was this solid-state drive that ended up in our laboratory at the time of writing this article. This copy The SSD is based on the SandForse SF-2281 controller, which has proven itself in other solid-state drives. They are distinguished by high read/write speeds and increased fault tolerance.

So what do we need?

This whole procedure will not take you even 30 minutes, but the performance of the laptop will increase quite seriously - the operating system and applications will load almost instantly and in general the laptop will “respond” to your requests much faster. This is because the system will have instant access to data, and this is exactly what is necessary to increase the speed of operation.
In addition, it does not make any sounds even when actively working with data, so your MacBook will become even quieter.
In addition, due to the significantly lower power consumption of SSDs, compared to any 2.5" HDD, the MacBook will be able to work slightly longer on a single battery charge - this is another undeniable advantage of using solid-state drives in laptops.
The only thing that yours will lose is a couple of grams of weight, because an SSD is also a little lighter than HDD.

(early 2011) at home.

There is a crisis outside, and dreams of buying a new Macbook are dissipating like smoke. In these harsh times, when a kilogram of ordinary cucumbers costs as much as a kilogram of Israeli apples, it’s time to take out a screwdriver and update your faithful aluminum comrade with your own hands.

If you don’t have a screwdriver, hands, or lack the courage, please turn to the professionals of modding and repair. Trusted professionals live in the company ModMac, who, with unwavering hands, will mercilessly disassemble any gadget, repair it and put it back together without any unnecessary remaining parts.

On a winter Saturday morning, from the pattern of clouds in the sky, I realized it was time! Having made a backup, we and my MacBook Pro, went to workshop for rejuvenation surgery. The plans were to replace the original HDD cable with a new one, as well as replace the optical drive with a super-fast one SSD drive, using a special Optibay tray.

Few people know, but if you install an SSD drive instead of the native HDD, and install the native HDD second hard drive instead of a CD drive, then in this situation the system will work a little slower. Better SSD Insert the disk into the place of the optical drive, and leave the original HDD in its place. Productivity will be higher.

Upon arrival at the place, my laptop immediately passed into the hands of the specialist, and I got the small role of an impassive extra who recorded on camera every movement of the specialist’s hands.

Preparation

So, the MacBook Pro sat on the table, turned upside down, revealing its defenseless belly to our eyes. With deft movements of a Phillips screwdriver, 10 screws were unscrewed along the perimeter of the back cover. And then, without much effort, the lid was removed and carefully set aside.

Once again, I marveled at the ergonomic arrangement of all the components inside the brainchild of Steve Jobs. How fascinating it is that all the filling fits together!

The first stage has been successfully completed, we move on to the next level.

Replacing the HDD cable

In my MacBook, the hard drive is very easy to remove. In some models, for example, to remove the HDD you must first remove the battery, but this is not our case. So, what needs to be done, point by point:

1) Disconnect the cable leading from the battery to the board;

2) unscrew two screws and pull out the clamping bar;

3) gently pull the hard drive by the special tab and use your fingers (a mediator, a special plastic spatula) to disconnect the cable from hard drive.

The hard drive cable is very fragile; tugging, tearing or twisting it strongly is not recommended.

Why do you need to change the cable to a new one: sometimes (rarely, but still) after replacing an ordinary HDD with an SSD, the MacBook disk begins to behave strangely. It seems that disk utility sees the new SSD, formats it and does not find any errors; The operating system is downloading, but all installation attempts are interrupted by a gray screen with a blinking folder icon or question mark.

In this case, replacing the hard drive cable helps. The operation is very delicate and requires confident movements and some skill in such actions. Here's how to replace the HDD cable:

1) Carefully disconnect the cable connector from the board, unscrew the two screws that secure the cable in the case and the two screws that secure the black strip on the front inner wall of the case.

Using your fingers, carefully pull out the black strip to which the HDD cable is glued and you will be horrified by the miniature size of the connector, which must be carefully removed.

At this stage you need to gather all your concentration and use tweezers to disconnect the connector from the HDD cable. You can’t swear at your mother, it’s advisable to breathe every other time.

After this dangerous procedure, you can exhale and relax, the HDD cable has been completely removed.

So, at this stage we have removed the original hard drive and completely disconnected its cable. To install a new cable, all the above steps must be repeated in reverse order. Again, the hardest part is connecting the small connector to the connector of the new HDD cable.

Replacing an optical drive with an SSD drive

Carefully disconnect the cable responsible for Airport/Bluetooth and the camera cable from the board. These cables (like most others) are quite fragile and breakable.

Then carefully remove the cable around the perimeter of the CD drive and disconnect the antenna connector.

The easiest thing remains: unscrew the three screws holding optical drive, carefully remove it and disconnect the cable connector. That's it, half the job is done, now you need to insert an SSD drive into the resulting void.

SSD and Optibay

Everything is simple here. Take an Optibay tray, insert a brand new SSD drive into it, tighten two fixing screws on the side, insert a short cable from the CD drive into the tray, which was removed in the previous step, and insert the entire resulting structure into place. Finally, repeat all the above-described manipulations to remove the drive in reverse order.

At the very end, the main thing is not to forget to connect back the battery cable, which was disconnected at the very beginning of this instruction article.

Note to the hostess

After “upgrading” the MacBook master from ModMac can set up something like Fusion Drive.

Fusion Drive is a technology that combines a conventional hard drive (HDD) and a solid state drive (SSD) with 128 GB of flash memory into a single logical volume. Mac OS X automatically manages its contents, so frequently used files such as applications, documents, photos (and so on) are dynamically moved to flash memory for faster access. For example, if a program is used frequently, it will automatically be moved to the SSD drive to speed up access to it. As a result, startup times are reduced, and as the system accumulates data about the computer's usage profile, program launch and file access speeds up.
– Wikipedia

Through clever manipulations with terminal commands, the guys from ModMac can configure a MacBook so that the system will see one shared disk with a capacity of 768 gigs (total capacity of SSD and HDD drives) as if it were one SSD drive.

Productivity increases, nerves are protected, and the owner is happy. I highly recommend it. The only caveat is that you need to avoid emergency shutdowns while using the laptop, Fusion Drive may “crumble” and you will have to restore all the information again ( so you should always remember about backup!).

MacBook Air wasn't intended to be expanded or upgraded, but it turns out that with a little effort you can replace the SSD yourself. This will significantly increase the laptop's storage size and often its performance. Another common reason that requires installing a new SSD is that it has broken down. In any case, replacing the SSD on a MacBook Air is easy and the procedure remains the same.

Preparation

To install a new SSD you will need a few things:

• a new, replaceable solid-state drive compatible with your existing laptop model;
• special screwdrivers (Torch 5T and Pentalobe);
• 2-3 small containers for temporary storage of screws.

The process of replacing the SSD on a MacBook Air is fairly simple, although it does involve disassembling and reassembling the Mac. Please keep in mind that this method is only applicable to laptops whose warranty period has already expired. Replacement hardware may void the warranty, so if it is still valid, you need to contact support or an Apple store, where everything necessary will be done by professionals.

Step 1: Check compatibility

First of all, you should make sure that the SSD is compatible with specific model MacBook Air. This usually depends on the year of manufacture of the device, so it is important to know it. This information You can get it from the About This Mac menu. Something like “MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2012)” or a similar message will appear on the screen.

After defining exact name model and year of manufacture, a compatible solid state drive can be found on online retail sites such as Amazon.

Step 2: SSD selection

The choice of brands and types of SSDs is large, and the user can follow his preferences. An example is Transcend's 240GB upgrade kit. Users like it for several reasons: favorable price, high speed work, excellent reviews, good warranty and a complete upgrade kit that includes a case for old SSD and screwdrivers needed to complete the job. Other brands also offer similar package solutions.

Of course, you are absolutely free to buy another compatible SSD that is not part of the kit. You just need to get the appropriate screwdrivers and ensure that the drive and Mac are compatible.

Other drives can be connected using an SSD adapter. The MacBook Air should be released no later than 2012, since since then Apple has introduced encryption of data flows between the solid-state drive and motherboard.

Step 3: Backup

Before replacing the SSD on your Macbook Air, you need to create a copy of the drive. Experts recommend at least setting up backup Time Machine, and some more sophisticated users combine this measure with direct disk cloning tools SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. The only exception is when the disk has completely failed or is missing - obviously there is nothing to copy here.

By connecting external drive, you need to go to the system settings menu, select the Time Machine option and specify the recording location backup copy.

This step should not be skipped. If a backup is not created, there will be nothing to restore, and new disk will not contain the required data. This is not something you would want to experience yourself. Using Time Machine also has the advantage of being able to perform a clean install operating system on the new SSD and then restore your Mac from the backup.

Step 4: Replace the drive

Now comes the fun part - opening the case and replacing the MacBook Air SSD with a new one. For this you will need boxes for screws, since you will have to deal with fasteners of different sizes and types. It is better to sort fasteners by size and installation location.

This part of the process requires some skill. Users with an electronics background will likely be at ease, but others will want to read the manual for details on how to proceed. Instead of reinventing the wheel, experts recommend familiarizing yourself with detailed instructions on the iFixIt website as they are well explained, detailed and comprehensive.

The main thing to do is to disconnect the laptop from the power source, unscrew the bottom panel and remove it, disconnect the internal battery, and then change the SSD. According to iFixIt, the difficulty of replacing a 13" MacBook Air SSD is rated as moderate, but according to experts, anyone with patience and the ability to follow instructions can easily complete the job, even if they are a beginner.

Instructions for replacing SSD

To replace the SSD you must:

1. Remove the screws on the bottom MacBook panels Air 13 and put into separate boxes according to their sizes, types and installation location.
2. Remove the bottom panel. Discharge static electricity before touching internal components.
3. Disconnect the internal battery. To do this, take the plastic holder attached to the battery connectors and pull it towards the front edge of the laptop. Don't forget about this, as well as the fact that it will need to be connected again after installation is complete.
4. Remove the SSD by first unscrewing the screw that holds it in place. The device is located in the center, directly above the battery.
5. Install the new SSD, secure it with a screw, and then connect the internal battery.
6. Place the bottom cover and secure it.

Once everything is back in place, you can begin installing the software.

Step 5: X and Data Recovery

The procedure described here is slightly different from the steps outlined in some other technical manuals. In this case, an empty solid-state drive is installed, which then requires OS installation and data recovery. Others advise copying the contents of the drive before replacing the SSD in your MacBook Air. Cloning ahead of time is often the best approach, but if the drive fails, this is not possible as it becomes completely inoperable, as evidenced by the question mark on boot and the Apple hardware test.

Fortunately, the availability of backup copies of Time Machine allows you to do installation and recovery differently. If you prefer the cloning method, Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper are applications that will do the job perfectly.

Data recovery procedure

The first option involves two steps: performing a clean installation of the operating system using a bootable flash drive, and then restoring the Time Machine backup during installation. It works great. Please remember that you can begin restoring a MacBook Air SSD backup immediately after a clean installation of Mac OS X.

To do this, connect the disk with the backup data and turn on the laptop while holding the Command+R buttons. On the utilities screen, you must select “Restore Backup” and click “Continue.” Having specified the disk with the copy, you need to select its date and time. Once the copying process is complete, the laptop will reboot.

You can also try using Time Machine directly. But this means that you have to manually create the recovery partition again, and you may encounter EFI partition errors. These problems can be avoided by first performing a clean Mac installation OS X

Once the operating system and data are restored, the laptop is ready for normal use with the new SSD.

Apple has always been expensive when it comes to pricing storage in its devices. In both the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook, every step to increase the storage capacity costs a pretty penny. And gigabytes from Apple are significantly more expensive than the market average. There is no doubt about it, these are usually very fast gigabytes, and you don’t have to particularly regret overpaying. And yet sometimes the toad strangles. And you buy the option with a smaller drive. You hope to squeeze in and somehow get by. But you always, absolutely always face a lack of volume.

In the case of iPhone and iPad, the problem is partly, but on relatively old MacBooks (before 2016), you can change the SSD. But if you use original components, this is a very expensive pleasure. For example, a 256 GB drive will cost 30 thousand rubles if you buy a new one, and 18-20 thousand for a used one. It bites, you know. Meanwhile, “just an SSD” of this size is sold for 9-10 thousand. For 16-18 thousand you can get a 512 gigabyte model. The proprietary nature of the Apple connector is overcome with the help of an adapter, which costs about 1000 rubles on Aliexpress, and 2-3 thousand in Russian shops.

The autopsy showed...

I'll tell you about mine own experience with a MacBook Pro 13, model Early 2015. I got it with a 128 gigabyte SSD, which, in general, was enough, but still somehow itched - what if I need to edit some kind of incendiary video, but there’s not enough space? For some reason I didn’t want to spend 30 thousand. But with non-native SSDs, everything is not so simple. The fact is that Apple has its own problems, due to which disks from other manufacturers are seen by the operating system only after dancing with a tambourine, enabling TRIM also requires shamanism, and there are also problems with hibernation, which has to be disabled.

In particular, such overlays occur with the Samsung 960 EVO, which is often purchased to upgrade MacBooks. I didn't want to deal with something like this.

Deep googling showed that one of the least problematic SSDs for the MacBook Pro Early 2015 is the Kingston KC1000. The 240 GB model (I certainly don’t need more) costs an average of 8,500 rubles. For this we get a drive with a stated read speed of 2700 MB/s and write speed of 900 MB/s. For comparison, the original Apple SSD gives 1200/700 for reading and writing, respectively. It’s worth mentioning here that Kingston’s recording is relatively slow only on the younger model, and already from 480 GB it grows to 1600 MB/s. But, I repeat, I don’t need such a volume, and overpaying would not make any sense.

Considering that I had never upgraded a MacBook before, I asked the guys from the Fixed.One service to help me with this matter. Looking ahead a little, I will say that if you have special screwdrivers (five- and hexagonal stars), the operation can be done at home.

Let's go. First we unscrew back cover and admire how beautifully everything is arranged inside. The SSD is secured with one screw. A slight movement and the slot is free.

The adapter came from China, it looks modest, but, on the other hand, it doesn’t need to work miracles. There are no electronics on it - everything is limited to redirecting contacts from the Apple connector to a regular M.2 connector. Something similar happened with proprietary Sony cards: it quickly became clear that regular microSD can be perfectly inserted into a portable PSP console through a cheap adapter.

The installation procedure is as follows: first insert the adapter into the connector, then insert the new SSD into it. If we are talking about a capacious model (for example, a terabyte), it makes sense to wrap the contact area with thermal tape for secure fastening and additional heat removal. But in our case this would be clearly unnecessary, because this model Kingston heats up very moderately, and in conjunction with the existing adapter it sticks out above the board slightly higher than the original and is in excellent contact with the thermal interface on the cover. The length matches completely, so the KC1000 was fixed with a screw from its predecessor.

When turned on, the MacBook expectedly complained that there was no boot disk, but after inserting the flash drive with the distribution kit High Sierra, immediately saw the new SSD and offered to install the OS on it. A very important point: without upgrading to High Sierra, it is impossible to install a third-party drive, and you need to upgrade the operating system BEFORE replacing the drive.

The installation went without the slightest hiccups. It’s real - there’s not even anything to tell. Once completed, I restored all the data from the Time Machine copy on the flash drive. This turned out to be significantly faster than over the air, but still slow relative to the capabilities of the flash drive. It can transfer up to 300 megabytes per second, and recovery proceeded at an average speed of 20 megabytes, only sometimes increasing to 40-50 megabytes.

Immediately after the recovery, I ran a benchmark and, frankly, was pretty discouraged: according to its data, the read and write speed was below 400 MB/s. At the same time, the speed of work was the same. Launching applications, switching between them - that's it. I have a suspicion that the problem is in the background tasks with which the system loads the disk, and in particular with the Spotlight indexing service. The latter works furiously in the first days after installing a new drive, re-learning files, letters, contacts, etc., which leads not only to slower operation, but also to increased energy consumption. You can disable indexing by entering the command in Terminal sudo mdutil -a -i off. But it’s probably better to just wait until the system realizes itself again and calms down.

Actually, the very next day the benchmark showed completely different, more encouraging numbers. This is not at the peak of SSD capabilities, but noticeably higher than on the original drive, released, let me remind you, three years ago.

What pitfalls may arise? Firstly, with a non-native SSD, the MacBook Pro tends to wake up incorrectly from hibernation - it crashes and goes into reboot. This happened to me a couple of times, but only on the first day, when background FileVault data encryption was in progress. After it ended (pah-pah-pah) everything became normal. If your problem persists, you need to type the command in the terminal sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25. But the best thing, as experts say, is to reset the laptop and set it up from scratch, rather than restore it from Time Machine. Then there will be no problems getting out of sleep. I haven’t checked it myself yet, but I trust the experts.

Secondly, the drive may not operate at full capacity. This is also stated in the honest descriptions of the adapters: they do not pump more than 2 GB/s. Plus, not all lines can earn PCI Express, for example only two instead of the maximum four. My diagnostic utility shows either x2 or x4. This does not affect performance. And by the way, I don’t even know - maybe the original SSD had the same behavior.

But in general, especially after the release of High Sierra 10.13.3, third-party SSDs work decently, and if you're lucky with the adapter, you'll save a very significant amount. To be lucky, it is better to buy it in Russia and from companies that conduct preliminary testing of this kind of hardware.

Many thanks to Fixed.One for help with the upgrade. The Kingston KC1000 has shown full suitability for use in a MacBook, and given that they have a maximum capacity of 960 GB, this will allow someone to increase the storage capacity to a very impressive size at a very reasonable cost.

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Hi all! Today I’ll tell you how I changed the hard drive to an SSD drive in my new MacBook. I already talked about on my blog, and that I bought a MacBook Pro 13 without Retina. So in this laptop The HDD is terribly slow, its rotation speed is 5400, which is why there are noticeable freezes when launching certain applications or when waking up from sleep. I especially notice this because in desktop computer I've been using it for 3 years now SSD Hard disk on which I have the system installed and necessary programs, plus I also bought one SSD drive for games, sometimes I like to play various cool games.

I'm not saying that Apple missed the mark with this laptop and made it slow, no. It’s just different, someone wouldn’t even notice it if there was nothing to compare it with.

This laptop has a disk drive, I found a lot of videos and articles on the Internet about the upgrade option by replacing the disk drive with optibay (DVD slim 9.5mm adapter for HDD) in which you can put a hard drive instead of a disk drive and put an SSD in the place where the HDD was. I bought everything, an adapter and an SSD drive for 256 GB Vertex 450 from the manufacturer OCZ (It has a crazy price of 7890 rubles.) Why did I choose OCZ? – For me, this is a proven longevity manufacturer, since SSDs have a limited number of write cycles.

Optibay - This is a very interesting thing, many thanks to whoever came up with this, I think this thing will be useful for those whose laptop is no longer completely new, it can be installed instead SSD drive the drive and Windows will work many times faster even on not very powerful hardware.

I thought for a long time and decided that, in principle, I didn’t need second HDD instead of a disk drive and decided to leave the disk drive and just install a 256 gigabyte SSD, this is not so small for a work laptop, especially since I have an external one USB hard and desktop PC.

Let's get started replacing that very slow HDD!

The first thing we need is a tool, we need a small Torx Phillips screwdriver, I still have it from the time I changed the glass on my old iPhone 4. Hexagon and plastic spatula, also included in the kit. Tool when parsing Apple technology plays a very important role! No need to twist those little bolts with a knife! I recommend not to rush and if you don’t have the necessary tools, then it’s better not to start, but first buy everything you need.

Now I need to remove static electricity from myself, I looked on the Internet how to do this and decided that it would be easier to just strip down to my underpants than to look for all sorts of antistatic agents

Turn off the laptop and turn it over

Before unscrewing, draw a diagram on a piece of paper so as not to get confused in the bolts, because in all Apple technology, almost all the bolts are different. Here we have 3 long and 7 short in these seven by 4 there is a border, this is important.

So let’s draw something like this and put the bolts in their places so that we can screw them back into place without any problems! This method works in disassembling any device, and it is very effective - why didn’t I know about it when I was disassembling my toys as a child

Unscrew it, arrange the bolts, remove the cover and disconnect the power cable! Otherwise, if you accidentally drop a screwdriver or some other metal object on motherboard will happen short circuit and that’s it, screw it, replace the motherboard... and maybe something else.

We do everything confidently and carefully with a plastic spatula!

Next, unscrew the hard drive holder. Again, I’m surprised at how simple and high-quality everything is made, the holder is metal, the orange rubber bands in the photo clamp the mounting bolts so that the hard drive feels comfortable, I think it even cushions it a little when hit and causes less damage to the hard drive.

After removing the holder, carefully lift the hard drive and pull out the SATA cables; if it is difficult to disconnect, pry it off with a plastic spatula.

We twisted it, now we put our SSD in place, carefully connect the cable, and first insert the lower bolts into the orange rubber bands and clamp them with the holder.

We close the lid back, take the bolts from our diagram, and screw everything into place.

Don’t worry about the operating system, Apple excelled here too! Now we'll install everything. Yes, all data from the old hard drive will have to be transferred by connecting to a computer or via a SATA to USB adapter, I think this will not be difficult.

We connect the laptop to the Internet via cable (this is faster) or via Wi Fi, it will ask you to select an access point, which one to connect to, enter the password and that’s it.

Turn on the laptop and hold down the CMD + R keys until the progress bar appears, after the bar is filled we will see this image:

Unfortunately, they offer to install OS X Mountain Lion, although OS X Mavericks has been released for a long time, but it’s okay to update later, we don’t have Hackintosh (I used Hackintosh on my desktop PC for about a year, that’s when my craving for Apple began, especially caught the attention of Time Machine, this thing will never be in Windows!)

Don't rush to click continue, first go to top menu in Utilities, Disk Utility and create or partition a hard drive. After that, click “Continue”, accept the license agreement, and select the disk on which we will install.

I have one, I didn’t share it:

Waiting for the download process installation files system, you don’t have to sit and wait, he will do everything to the end in automatic mode, after downloading the files, it will reboot and the installation will begin, which will proceed quite quickly.

Here is the result of the work speed, using the launch example Adobe Photoshop CS 6:

There was a case when I installed Windows 8 on an SSD using the installation USB flash drive 3.0, on PC with Intel processor i5, to be honest I was shocked because the installation time from start to desktop took only 8 minutes! This is cool, what will happen in the future?

That's all, I think the information will be useful. Thank you for your attention! Subscribe to my blog updates. Ask questions in the comments, in the future I think I’ll write how I installed more random access memory, but for now I’m happy with 4 gigabytes on my laptop.