Back in October, I talked about an article outlining how I can upgrade my internal 80GB hard drive inside my Macbook to a whopping 500gb! Here’s the entry I’m talking about.
For the past few months I have been keeping an eye on the prices of a 500GB drive and finally stumbled upon a good deal. Last week, I noticed that there were some drives available on the Costco.ca website for $170 so I managed to get to Costco in Gatineau with Ferda (real reason: their delicious hot dogs!) but there were no drives in that size available. Boo. Then on Sunday, Eric and Annie graciously offered to go to the Costo in Gloucester with me but I couldn’t find the hard drive there either. What the heck? How do you offer something online, as well as have it in stock in major metropolis like Vancouver and Toronto, but somehow fail to offer it up in Ottawa? Bah.
Then I started reading about price-matching. I had known about the idea of price matching but had never tried to do so myself. I then saw that newegg.ca had the drive down to $152. That’s more like it! I printed off the pertinent information and Vero graciously brought me to Best Buy last night. I found the Western Digital My Passport 500GB drive and headed to the cash. It was around 6PM so there wasn’t many people around the cash which probably aided my case.
I asked the cashier about price matching and she said “Most certainly we price match, depending on some factors.” I showed her the price of $152 for the drive from newegg.ca. She then said it didn’t account for shipping. I then produced a sheet indicating that the shipping would be $13. Success! She said that’s fine and started punching numbers into her calculator. Here’s some advice to all those who want to price match at Best Buy. The 110% is a flawed logic, or at least one that I didn’t understand. Essentially you can get it for the price that you show them (aka, the $52+$13 from newegg) and then they figure out the difference between their price and the competitor’s and then they take 10% off of that difference. I was thrown off of this for a bit as I thought I was supposed to be getting another couple of bucks off but she explained it’s a percentage of the difference.
Nevertheless, it came out to $163 before taxes and that was pretty well the same price I would have got it for from newegg.ca, only the difference was that I have the drive in hand vs. having to wait for it to be shipped. PLUS the cashier said that if I found a better deal in the next thirty days, I can get the difference, even if I found newegg.ca was offering free shipping! I shall be a hawk looking for a better price than $163 in the next thirty days!
I walked out victorious!
Vero and I then headed back to my house so I could pick up some tools. Vero was not impressed with this leg of the trip as I had originally asked if it was “alright to go home and pick up some tools” in which she thought I was talking about her place! I found a precision screwdriver and grabbed the new tool kit that Vero’s parents gave me for Christmas and headed back to the house.
Warning: From this point on, it gets boring for those not interested in the swapping of hard drives.
I get home, and first off, start following the instructions from that great article mentioned above. A great public service was made by this individual who outlined the process!
First step was to make a copy of my laptop drive onto the external drive. This was the most painful portion of the process as the copying process took 3 whole hours. I was not expecting this. When it was done around 10PM, I booted the computer back up using the external drive as my boot drive (just to test it out) and it was successful!
I then went to town on cracking open the external hard drive plastic casing to get the hard drive out. This was quite annoying as I didn’t know the inner workings of the plastic case. After ten minutes, I finally managed to slide the hard drive out. I then carefully pulled away the plastic/rubber fittings and pulled the SATA/USB interface chip (which was quite tough to get off. Give it a good yank).
I then took the battery out of the laptop and proceeded to yank the hard drive out of it. I hit my first snag in that it needed a torx screwdriver but there must be a precision set of torx that was needed because the set I had was too large. I didn’t want to admit defeat so I took some needle-nose pliers and turned the screws that way (strangely enough, the same exact way the person writing the article did it). I then swapped the hard drives and put the laptop back together and brought the laptop over to Vero for the moment of truth.
The chime came on and a blank grey screen appeared. Hmm..this wasn’t looking too well. However, after thirty seconds, the Apple symbol appeared and presto! It worked! I shut the computer down to try it again and sure enough, it took about 30 seconds but it worked! My thinking on the long boot up times may be that I have moved from an 80gb drive to a 500gb drive so maybe it cycles through some hard drive check and it takes a lot longer.
Either way, the project was a success! I then went back to the old 80gb drive and placed it back into the external plastic hard drive case and now I have a nifty little 80gb external hard drive. Let me tell you something about the Western Digital Passport drives. They are TINY! Because they hold a 2.5″ drive inside of them, those things can fit inside my pants pocket if I wanted to! It also runs off of one USB cable so I don’t have to bring a power supply anywhere with me. This will be extremely handy for those times I want to pass the drive over to Benoit and say “Fill ‘er up!”
So in the end, it took 3 hours to copy the entire 80gb, and about 45 minutes to perform the surgery. I was extremely impressed with how easy it was to do. Heck, Apple isn’t stupid. They know people want to upgrade the hard drives. They even have a tutorial on their own website on how to do it!
I really think this will be a great advantage in editing videos now. Before it was daisy-chaining over to the external USB drive which was slow but now I’m anticipating it to be quite fast.
If you are the feeling the crunch with the small laptop drive that you have, swap it!
Next steps in the computer world are to track down a match for my burnt out Seagate Hard drive (no luck yet) as well as pick up another hard drive to act solely as a backup to all my files. I’m not getting burned twice! Plus, Apple has a nifty backup software called Time Machine which makes backing up…fun?