There are a couple of ways to upgrade the hard drive to a larger or newer one on your Mac.
1. Go to the Apple Store and have them upgrade it for you for a premium.
2. Do it yourself.
Now this post isn’t going to tell you how access your hard drive. The assumption is that if you are planning to do this yourself already, you probably already have a certain level of technical expertise and know how to access your hard drive.
So before we begin, understand this…do a FULL Time Machine backup before doing this so JUST IN CASE you make a mistake, you can always just reinstall your Mac OS and then run a lengthy Time Machine restore.
Why do you want to do it the way I’m about to iterate?
Simply because it’s a faster way to do it. I hate waiting unnecessarily…don’t you?
So…with the warnings out of the way…let’s get to the fun part!
1. Get your new hard drive.
2. Attach your new hard drive to your Mac with a USB adapter. If you don’t have one, it’s a great tool. You can order one HERE.
3. Initialize and format your drive for the Mac. Go to Disk Utilties > Choose the new drive as it’s listed on the left column > click on Partition > Partition the new drive accordingly (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)). The drive should show up after you do this. [IMPORTANT: Make sure you don't accidentally re-partition your old drive! To be safe, label the new drive something easy like "New Drive" you can always change it later after you're done.]
4. Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) for Mac HERE.
5. Run CCC
6. For Source Disk choose the hard drive currently on your Macbook
7. For Target Disk choose the new hard drive that you hopefully named differently than your source disk.
8. Under Cloning options: choose “Backup everything”
9. Click on Clone and let it go!
10. When finished, just swap out the old drive with the new drive.
That’s it!
This program is great because it offers other backup options as well. However, since Time Machine is great already, this is better used as a tool to transfer all your current data, programs, and settings in one single step. No longer do you have to install the operating system, connect with your time machine backup, and then wait for a lengthy restore. You can just do it in one transfer.
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