By Aaron Sumner, Guest Blogger
I just replaced my MacBook Pro’s original 350 GB hard drive with a 240 GB solid state drive from Other World Computing, installed with the Data Doubler bracket.
While I was at it I figured I’d go ahead and install a fresh copy of Mountain Lion on the new drive (upgrading from Lion on the old drive). I’m almost two days into the upgrade and wanted to share my experiences so far.
First off, some rationale: Why upgrade my drive instead of my computer, and why go with a Data Doubler instead of just swapping the drives? First off, while I admittedly covet the 13-inch Retina Display, I was hoping to get at least another year out of my old Core 2 Duo-based model. I’ve had the RAM maxed out since the day I bought it, so the next feasible update was a faster and/or larger hard drive. I’d initially thought about swapping the stock drive with a solid state drive and putting the stock into an external enclosure, but realized that would mean having to tote an external drive around whenever I wanted access to my photos or music. Not ideal. I also thought about just dropping as large of a hard drive as I could buy into the laptop, but figured that wouldn’t get me anywhere in terms of speed. Article Continues…



There are very compelling reasons to upgrade your current MacBook Pro. While my MacBook Pro is still a 2011 model with 8GB of RAM, I always felt that it could be a bit faster. Even with the 7200RPM Toshiba drive fitted, IO operations felt sluggish (even more so after installing the OWC) and I wanted to see if a SSD would make a big difference.