MacBook Pro Model A1211
I’ve now upgraded three of these MacBook Pro model A1211 Apple Laptops with extra RAM and a faster hard drive. I’m as pleased with the results as when I did the first upgrade!! The performance gains have been astonishing. If you haven’t yet, read my article about the performance change before and after the upgrade in the Upgrade your Macbook Pro article.
The machine I’m writing this on was a real pig and always seemed even slower than same generation Macbooks (although I’m sure that had to be in my mind). Now it’s snappy and responsive even running both Windows 7 in VMWare along with all the other stuff I’m doing.
This particular upgrade means going from 2 gb of RAM to 4 and swapping out the old Hitachi 160 gb 5400 rpm drive for a faster and larger Seagate 250 gb 7200 rpm drive.
The hardware upgrade is fairly easy on this model. Just remove about 20 screws and the keyboard/trackpad assembly lifts up to expose the hard drive. Disconnect a few cables, remove a few more screws and swap in the new HDD. It’s of course the exact same size, just better. Button everything back up.
One of the most recent ones need the OS installed on it from scratch so I just went about installing Snow Leopard on that one. The second was a true upgrade and I needed to move all the data over to the new drive. I have a USB HDD adapter that allows you to connect either a full size or laptop size HDD to the computer via a USB port. Doing this allowed me to boot to the original HDD. Once in the OS I used the Disk Utility to initialize and partition the new HDD. Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy all the info onto the new drive. Once it was complete (about one hour for 50 GB) I shutdown the Macbook, disconnected the USB HDD and booted normally into the OS.
Viola! Full upgrade in about an hour and half. The cost was about $150 per unit with shipping and all. This is a small investment towards a computer that will last several more years! My recommendation- upgrade your Macbook Pro. Do it NOW!
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