MacOS – How to upgrade a harddisk in Macbook Pro

macbook promacos

I have Macbook pro
13inch, retina display
with i5 processor and
8GB RAM with 128 GB SSD, earlier 2015 model.
With OSx Yosemite 14.1.0
I need to upgrade SSD with 750 GB.
I have following questions on this.

  1. Is it a good Idea to upgrade it in Macbook? I have done several suck operations in Linux and windows machine, but haveing no Idea what it will impact on OSx re-installation and bootcamp.
  2. Its Obivous that SSD will updgrade the performace, but is it significant improves the performace (FYI- I have heavy code compilation work).
  3. What are all backups and percautions one must take while upgrading the SDD on macbook?(Newbie to mac world.)
  4. Can I use the external SDD as a different partition for my MacBook?

Thanks in Advance!

Best Answer

1) I would suggest using an external drive? Why? For the simple reason that upgrading the MBP SSD is expensive! It's not your standard SATA drive. A new 1TB SSD for that computer will run you ~$650 (based on OWC prices).

2)Your SSD Read/Write speed should already be around 400-500MBps. A new SSD's performance would probably not be noticeable. It is almost certainly not worth paying the $650 for just the speed boost.

3) I would suggest at least one (possibly two) backups. Note that if you buy your new SSD from OWC or if you get the OWC Envoy, you can plug your old SSD into your computer via USB, so having an extra (second) backup is less important if you take this route.

4) I'm not sure exactly what you mean here. You can use an external SSD as either a storage drive or a boot drive or both, but boot times from an external drive might be slower than from an internal drive.

Please comment with any questions or if you see any mistakes in my answer.

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