So you’re like me, and you just love your uni­body Mac­book Pro. The design still turns heads, the size is just right and you can’t get enough of the great apps and soft­ware avail­able for it. The only prob­lem is, over time your baby has become slug­gish and unre­spon­sive, and your iTunes library has your stock hard drive burst­ing at the seams.
Not to worry, all hope isn’t lost, it just took me $300 and a cou­ple hours of scour­ing the web, to take my 13″ Mac­Book Pro through time into 2012.

Cur­rent Setup

• 2009 13″ Mac­Book Pro 2.26GHz  Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 RAM
• 160GB 5400RPM SATA HDD

The Good: Since it’s release in ’09, besides releas­ing the Mac­Book Air which is a slim­mer “SSD stan­dard” lap­top, Apple hasn’t changed the design of the Mac­Book lineup, so the design is still cur­rent.  My 13″ is the per­fect size for me, it’s light, portable and the bat­tery life is impres­sive still after 3 years!

The Bad: Speed.  I’m a bit of a self pro­claimed app hoarder, and with over 100 appli­ca­tions includ­ing Adobe CS5, Light­room 3, Aper­ture (all RAM hogs) I see the colour wheel so much i feel like I’m trip­pin on acid!  4 gigs of ram is noth­ing to sneeze at, but with the price of mem­ory so low, and with the capa­bil­ity to upgrade to 8GB it’s a no brainer.  Finally, 160GB stock hard drive!? It prob­a­bly had cob­webs com­ing out of the factory!

Upgrades

• 128GB SATAII SSD ($120) — To replace the cur­rrent 160GB hard drive
• Dual Drive Enclo­sure ($20) — To house the sec­ond hard drive in the opti­cal bay location
• 2x4GB 1066 DDR3 RAM ($45) — Upgrade from 2x2GB sticks
• 750GB 7200RPM SATA HDD ($90) — To replace the stock Super­Drive Opti­cal Bay
• USB Hard Drive Enclo­sure ($20)- To for­mat the new dri­ves before install
• USB Opti­cal Drive Enclo­sure (Optional) — To turn the Super­Drive I remove into a func­tion­ing USB opti­cal drive

[Show as slideshow]

The Pro­ce­dure

I had a hard time decid­ing how I wanted to go about the upgrade.  Every Joe and his brother has “the best” method of swap­ping hard dri­ves and upgrad­ing to an SSD.  Spend an hour search­ing the web, and you’ll be on the verge of throw­ing in the towel because you can’t decide which route to go. But there are a cou­ple of sim­ple two or 3 step meth­ods that I liked, and I’ll share the one I chose with you here.

This was a good read, it gave me an overview of what I wanted to do.

Another good read, to grasp the concept.

Here is a good video to help you swap the RAM, if you decided to do this upgrade at the same time.

Swap­ping Hard Dri­ves and Opti­cal Bay Components

The ulti­mate goal here is to uti­lize the SSD’s impres­sive speed but lim­ited size by hav­ing it run the OS, sys­tem files and applications–that’s it.  My user direc­tory and all my media and other files will be stored on the new, upgraded SATA drive which will sit where the opti­cal drive cur­rently resides.

The over­all pro­ce­dure goes like this; For­mat the dri­ves and install a clean ver­sion of Lion onto the SSD.  Use Car­bon Copy Cloner to copy my /user direc­tory to the 750GB SATA drive, and install it where the opti­cal drive cur­rently resides.  Back up the cur­rent Lion setup using Time machine and omit the /user direc­tory (it’s already on the sec­ond drive).  Install the SSD where the cur­rent hard drive resides, and restore the ver­sion of Lion that was just backed up using the Migra­tion Assis­tant in the Util­i­ties folder.  Finally, point Lion to the sec­ond drive, so it knows where the user direc­tory now lives, and how to access it.  That’s it! All done!

1. For­mat both hard dri­ves.  I bought a USB hard drive enclo­sure for $20 so I could com­plete this step.  Sim­ply con­nect the hard drive, open Disk Util­ity, and par­ti­tion the drive with 1 par­ti­tion, and select Mac OS Extended (Jour­naled) as the for­mat.  This shouldn’t take long, and repeat this process with both hard drives.

2. Install OS X Lion onto SSD.  This step is sim­ple, with the SSD con­nected via USB I just inserted my Lion disc, and chose to install Lion onto my new SSD.  Make sure to choose the proper drive!

3. Time to back up your cur­rent OS using Time Machine.  Open pref­er­ences, and des­e­lect your user direc­tory.  The total backup size shouldn’t be more than 50GB or so.  Once the backup is done, turn Time Machine off.

4.  Now with the new SATA drive con­nected in the USB enclo­sure, run Car­bon Copy Cloner and copy the user direc­tory to the new drive.  Depend­ing on the size this shouldn’t take longer then an hour or so.  I only had 100GB and it took an hour.

Recap:  Now, the MBP is still in the same con­di­tion as when I started yet my 2 new hard dri­ves have both been for­mat­ted, and my SSD has a clean install of Lion on it, and my SATA drive (750GB) now has my user direc­tory on it and is ready to become home to all my files from here on out.  Time to get to swap­ping hard drives!

5.  First I took the back­ing off my MBP and swapped out the RAM.  Next, I did a sim­ple swap of hard dri­ves, putting the SSD where the cur­rent drive was.  Finally, using the video found here I exchanged the opti­cal drive for my dual disk hous­ing and stor­age drive.  I then put the back on, flipped her over and pow­ered her on.

6.  Upon pow­er­ing up, the SSD is now run­ning a brand new ver­sion of Lion, so I went through the setup pro­ce­dure, and cre­ated myself a new user (which I will redi­rect the sys­tem to the /user folder located on my sec­ond drive in the opti­cal bay).

7.  Now it’s time to run the Time Machine restore using Migra­tion Assis­tant found in the /Applications/Utilities folder.  This will restore Lion to the way it was before the drive swap.  Only one more step!

8. Finally, I went into Sys­tem Pref­er­ences and in the Users tab, it was time to redi­rect Lion to my user direc­tory ‚which is now stored on my sec­ond drive.  By default now, when I log into Lion using the new user I cre­ated, all the pref­er­ences from the pre­vi­ous hard drive will load, along with all of the files.

Voila!  I now have a super fast Mac­Book Pro which will give the newest of Mac­Book Airs a run for its money!  And all for just $300 and a cou­ple of hours time!

Just to recap.  I replaced the orig­i­nal hard drive with 2 new dri­ves; a 128GB SSD to run OS X and house all my appli­ca­tions, so every­thing runs super fast, and a sec­ond SATA drive (which replaced my opti­cal drive) cming in at 750GB and 7200RPM to keep all of my music, pho­tos, movies and doc­u­ments with room to spare.  I also dou­bled the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, so I can run as many appli­ca­tions as I want with no lag.

I’ve been run­ning the new setup for 2 weeks now, and is it ever fast!  Boot time went from about a minute from login, to under 20 sec­onds.  Apps open with­out any bounc­ing icon.  But the biggest improve­ment is found when I run apps like Aper­ture, which used to slow my sys­tem to a crawl, and crash it all the time, but now I can import, orga­nize and edit pho­tos all in real time with no color wheel, or lag at all!  I even have iTunes and other apps run­ning in the back­ground while using Aper­ture of Pho­to­shop with no worries.

If you own an older MBP, and are debat­ing an upgrade, save your money and go the dual drive route.  And if you’re wor­ried about not hav­ing an opti­cal drive, for $20 you can get a USB enclo­sure for the one you remove, and prob­lem soved!

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